Is "giffy" (meaning airborne salt spray) a real word?

My mother (from Charleston, South Carolina) uses the word "giffy" (spelling unknown; hard g sound) for airborne salt spray that gets all over cars, windows, and (in extreme cases) power lines when you have a windy day near a body of salt water. [Actually the day doesn't have to be locally windy if you are near the surf, which can put salt spray into the air using the strength of winds far away.] Unfortunately my google-foo was insufficient to prove that this word, with this meaning, actually exists.

Is this term used outside my immediate family, and/or does it have an obvious heritage from better-known terms?

Solution 1:

Okay, it seems to mean cloudy or damp. American Dialect Society's South Carolina Word List has an entry.

giffy [ˈɡɪfɪ]: adj. Cloudy and damp, applied to the weather. Origin undetermined, possibly African.

And from Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands by Lidia Parrish.

... even Dr. Turner is puzzled by "giffy", which on Sapelo means damp.

Weirdly, I found these guessing there might be a Gullah connection, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

From Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking edited by Lettie Gay. (Never fail to check local cookbooks for odd words.)

Pie crust doesn't turn out well in "giffy" weather, for flour, even flour stored in a heated house, absorbs moisture.

I can't help but wonder if the much more common iffy weather isn't the version that caught hold.

Solution 2:

According to The Dictionary of American Regional English, giffy (page 672) is a variant of the more common term givey (page 684), meaning:

(of things) be covered with moisture; become moist or soft from damp. (Chiefly Mid and South Atlantic)

I think the above sense is close to the usage of your family.

Solution 3:

The word may be related to givey, a South Midland dialect word with several related meanings (here from Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English (2021), via Word Reference):

1. (esp. of soil) moist, soft, or spongy

2. unsteady; rickety: That chair is getting a little givey.

3. (of weather) misty, rainy, or humid; damp.

Similarly, Robert Hendrickson in The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms defines givey as "Moist, muggy, soft. 'The weather's givey today.' " This meaning may go back to the 19th century, as an entry for givey ("humid") has been traced back to unpublished notebooks titled "Americanisms, Anglicisms, etc etc" kept by South Carolina College professor Francis Lieber between 1849 and 1851 (Stewart Davis, "Francis Lieber's Americanisms as an Early Source on Southern Speech," LAVIS).

So your mother's usage may be an extension of that meaning: the misty, damp salt spray that comes off the water during a windy day would be givey.