Michigan Man Invents New Word: Your Siblings' Kids Are Your 'Sofralia'

Imagine you’re having this conversation with Stephen Schneur Polter, a rabbi and attorney from Oak Park, and he casually asks:

“Have you seen your sofralia today?”

Baffled, you wonder if sofralia – pronounced soe-FRAIL-yah – about a souffle of some sort.Should you fake it and remark that it was delicious? Better play it safe.

“Have I seen my what?” you ask.

“Your nieces and nephews. Have you seen them?

“Oh, yes,” you say. “Why didn’t you just say that?”

In a word, Polter did.

He coined sofralia to collectively refer to nieces and nephews, and he hopes the word will one day be as common as parents and siblings, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Ultimately, Polter hopes sofralia will make it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which adds new words and terms based on their usage, including Michigan-favorite “da ‘Yoopers’ ” to describe residents of the Upper Peninsula, and “selfie” and “hashtag.”

But it wasn’t a place etymological history that motivated Polter. Saying nieces and nephews – and Polter has, combined, 90 sofralia and great-sofralia – became redundant.

“It was simply out of frustration, whereby I felt there was no collective term for that – nephews and nieces,” he said. “I played around with the Greek, Latin, prefixes, suffixes. It didn’t take a long time.”

Related:

• 10 Words and Phrases that Should Be Banished in 2015

Polter made a footnote pitch to those who read his fourth self-published book, “God Is Great: Setting he Record Straight,” which is available on Amazon.com, where he explained the origin of the word:

“Sorority is the Latin term for sister. Fraternity is the Latin term for brother. Phile or Philia or Filia is the Latin term for child. Thus if we take the first syllables of ‘sorority’ and ‘fraternity’, and the final syllable of ‘philia’, we get ‘sofralia’. In other words, children of brothers and sisters, i.e. nephews and nieces.”

Don’t Like Sofralia? How About Geschwisterkind?

University of Michigan professor of Greek and Latin Ruth Scodel told the Free Press Polter’s new word is nonsensical.

“This doesn’t make sense. This is an invented word based on Latin words, but it’s not a Latin formation. ... It’s a made-up word and it’s OK to make up words. If he wants to, fine. But no one would get much help from Latin for this,” Scodel said. “If we felt the need for his word, we would’ve probably created it.”

So far, it looks like the public agrees.

Polter admits his campaign to popularize sofralia is falling flat.

“I haven’t gotten much momentum,” Polter said. “I don’t have much occasion to use the word, but when I do, I definitely use it. Others that have read the book or know I came up with this word are quite impressed. I don’t know if they use it.”

If sofralia doesn’t catch on, Polter is in good company. In 1951, linguist Samuel Martin suggested “nibling,” a play on “sibling,” for nieces and nephews. It didn’t catch on. (Perhaps because it reminded people of young corn?) Neither did “niephling,” sometimes spelled “niefling.”

Oh, well.

There’s always “geschwisterkind,” the gender-neutral German word that Scodel prefers to describe nieces and nephews.

______

Photo licensed under Creative Commons