Last night my daughter was texting a friend and accidentally exposed herself to ridicule while complaining about chores by referring to our vacuum cleaner as “R2.” She then had to explain that we’ve always called our vaguely droid-shaped, canister model after the Star Wars bot.
When I was a teenage pothead, I was a sort of MacGyver of bong and pipe-making, fashioning smoking implements out of such diverse materials as sweet potatoes, empty cigarette packs, shampoo bottles, etc. Once, while casting about for pipe-making materials at a friend’s house, I asked if there was a “goodle” available:
From the gaping incomprehension that greeted this request followed by a mortifying outburst of laughter when I explained what I meant, I learned that no one else calls the cardboard tubes that form the structure of paper towel or toilet paper rolls “goodles.”
My siblings and I grew up thinking “goodle” was an honest-to-god, dictionary-certified word for an everyday item. Everyone in our family calls them that – aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. But it turns out my grandmother just made the term up because, as far as she knew, there wasn’t a proper name for it, and she thought it should have one.
Do you use made-up words for nameless items or have nicknames for household things that occasionally slip into everyday conversation? Just wondering how widespread a phenomenon it is. Feel free to treat this as an open thread, even though it may qualify as serious research.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
Alexandra
Is it a gooo-dle? Or a gud-all?
My younger sister and I call a mug of tea a ‘coil’. Don’t ask why.
Betty Cracker
@Alexandra: Rhymes with “poodle.”
Paul in KY
Take a ‘goodle’ and put 3 or 4 sheets of bounce in it & you can exhale the reefer smoke thru that. We called that a ‘reek tube’ when smoking in a parent’s basement.
Seth Owen
Your Grandma was right. It needs a name. Lord knows I end up with oodles of goodles in my bathroom in a house of seven people.
Seth Owen
Your Grandma was right. It needs a name. Lord knows I end up with oodles of ‘goodles’ in my bathroom in a house of seven people.
Kathi
We call goodles “der-der tubes”. I forget why…
chopper
@Paul in KY:
that was also called a ‘chillum’. have no idea why.
even though the term actually usually referred to a real pipe of some sort.
Alexandra
@Betty Cracker:
OK. Cool thread to start the day.
Most families and close-knit friends have in-language (I hope). More obscure, tangential and in some ways, much funnier than in-jokes. Kinda like a Spike Milligan thing, I guess.
My sisters and I are very good at keeping it strictly in-house, though. No inavertent slips in front of company.
NotMax
I am partial to making up words, some of which I keep in the mental Rolodex and drag out when appropriate. Couple of examples that have proved particularly useful over the past 40 or so years:
over the top, extremely mockable on its face behavior: bozoic
that step just beyond exhausted, when one is practically totally drained of energy: tattersnapped
Tokyokie
My mother had a number of expressions, mostly imprecations, that I thought were more or less standard usage until I started school and used a few of them and drew quizzical looks. Tweedlebomb!
OzarkHillbilly
Anigoggle… When coming to a “Y” intersection one ‘anigoggles’ left or right. (from my maternal grandmother) Also, though not a made up word, the Slovenian for ‘bellybutton’ is ‘popick’ (long ‘o’, short ‘i’) Have only heard my family using it. It was passed down by my fraternal grandparents who came over from the old country in 1900 and 1902.
OzarkHillbilly
Another popularized by an Arkansas buddy of mine: “Cidiot”. A cidiot is a person from the city who upon arrival in the country proceeds to wreak havoc through utter stupidity that any country boy knows better than to engage in.
ixnay
Der-der has an origin outside your family, somewhere in pop culture, but I can’t remember where. It’s because of the entertaining effect, particularly to the mentally altered person, of creeping up on someone and saying “der” very softly, through the tube, right into the ear.
Family words, invented by my grandfather, who had a penchant for such things: “Gazinta-gazonta” for large car transporter trailer – cars goes into it, cars goes onto it.
“Pajolerator” = cement mixer truck. Onomatopoeia, I suspect.
Halcyan
When I was a young, single mom of twins (boy and girl), I shared a home with another young single mom, of two girls. That was a lot of girls in our house, and I noticed that everyone was referring to underwear as “panties”. I reached for the Spanish word for underwear and the entire family has referred to them as “chonies” ever since.
c u n d gulag
I grew up in NY City, but until I went to Kindergarten, I didn’t speak any English.
So, I was ripe for mocking, since my family, who didn’t speak much English either, had come up with all sorts of names for things – some or them were phonetic work bombs, like instead of Pepsi Cola, my Grandmother, to be able to say it, called it “Pissy Cola,” and “thank you very much,” became Syanka beree myatch (phonetic for Syanka – a Russian name – take the ball).
After a few years, I thought I had finally rid myself of all of them, when, in 6th grade, I stayed overnight with a school friend’s family, and found out I hadn’t.
In the morning, my friend’s Mom asked me what I wanted for breakfast?
I said, “Some Kellog’s will be fine, thank you, Ma’am.”
And she pulled out several boxes of cereal, but said, “I’m sorry, these are all Post.”
“No,” I said, “Those are Kellog’s.”
And she said, “No, they’re Post.”
And I realize I had done it again.
Thankfully, at least I hadn’t asked for kielbasa, skryembled heggs, and Pissy Cola.
Pincher
Numerous examples.
A “pull through” is a pair of open parking spaces, back to back, in a parking lot. You pull into the first space, pull through to the second, and then you can exit without backing out!
To “vulture” a person is to follow him/her through a parking lot, waiting for them to get in their car and leave you a space.
Andrea
Unlurking for a moment to say: I make up words all the time! Sometimes they only take for the moment they are created but several have stuck around in my vocabulary:
aschoqua (a-shock’-wa): when talking to girlfriends, conveys the whole “You know me and you know I’m not trying to be a bitch/vain/judgemental/etc., BUT . . .” It replaces all the explaination before the “BUT”
testak (test’-ac): group of usually drunk drunk young men behaving like asses and ruining what would otherwise be a good time.
zaganducious (zag-an-doosh’-us): a combination of arrogant douchiness accompanied by a profound ingnorance of simple facts
FridayNext
In the last few years a lot of commercial bakery corporations have been making those “sandwich thins” because I guess sliced bread was too thick or people wanted more crust.
Early on we started calling them Flattos. I can’t remember why.
And if you have oodles of goodles around the house, find someone with a gerbil. You will make a friend for life.
Thoughtful David
blouin (pron: blew-in) (v): To almost but not quite, empty a container, especially a food container, and then retain and store it. The amount remaining should is less than useful; for example, an ounce of orange juice left in a big jug. Usage: “Who blouined the orange juice? I was wanting some with my cereal.” Blouining is especially frustrating when it causes you to not replace the item, for example, not buying a new container because you can see one (although it has been blouined) on the shelf and think you still have enough. Etymology: Named for a one-time houseguest prone to blouining.
NotMax
In pidgin in Hawaii, “da kine” is a term which can be dropped into a sentence as a placeholder for, well, anything. For instance (video ad).
donnah
Our family calls pound cake “bang bang” cake. My grandmother sometimes used to serve Sarah Lee pound cake with strawberries and whipped cream for dessert on Sundays. One evening after dinner, my baby brother asked for bang bang cake, and we were all stymied. Then he made a pounding motion on the table and we all burst out laughing.
Now at age 45, he still gets teased for it.
In a similar vein, a cousin called watermelon “meanermeaner” for no apparent reason, and we all picked that up as well.
Our family obviously ain’t that bright.
jprfrog
@OzarkHillbilly: That is also (or maybe originally) a Yiddish word. I would spell it “pupik”; I heard it constantly in my childhood since Yiddish was the native tongue of my mother and her two older sisters. (I was also reminded of it when hearing of the marathon runner Uta Pipig.)
Gex
Not really a made up word, but my favorite unit of measure is the metric fuck ton.
ixnay
Back to der-der: further research (asking my husband) reveals that it’s from “A Child’s Garden of Grass.”
Betty Cracker
Good ones, everybody!
@c u n d gulag: I experienced something similar to your Kellog’s moment when I briefly lived up North. Where I’m from, “Coke” serves as a generic term for any type of soda.
@Andrea: I think “aschoqua”would be a very useful addition to my vocabulary. “Testak” too.
Schlemizel
pretty mundane & obvious but they are hold overs from my mom & grandmom
icebox
street car
They replaced street cars with buses around here when I was 2 & I do remember 1 ride in one. Never saw an icebox in use. But to this day I will slip up and say icebox instead of fridge and take a street car when I am on the bus
Gex
Kate and I also used fuckwacky as a single word to describe a strange and fucked up situation.
My life is really fuckwacky right now.
'Niques
When things were confused and out of any kind of order, my Mom referred to them as “fishimeled”. A friend’s mom coined the word “superfulous” meaning splendid, awesome, etc.
Paul in KY
@chopper: Cool! Another word I can call it by. Had never heard of ‘chillum’.
NotMax
@Gex
Could also be used as a descriptor of a gay sumo orgy.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that….
R-Jud
The Bean has provided us with a number of neologisms and nicknames as her speech has emerged. I used one the other day in mixed company without thinking: offered my guests tea and a “gok”, when I meant tea and a biscuit. One of them works out with me and offered me a “protein gok” this morning.
Lately her thing is stringing two words together for emphasis, especially when she’s been thwarted. So the other night when I told her she couldn’t have any chocolate, she was “Angry-mad” and said I was a “nappy-poo”.
soonergrunt (mobile)
@Gex: glad I’m not alone in that one.
Paul in KY
@Halcyan: My relatives called underwear ‘Skivvies’.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
A goodle is a sniglet.
sniglet: any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should
aimai
@jprfrog:
Beat me to it! Plenty of pupiks in Florida when der kinder come down to see the grandparents.
An old family friend, related to the Haldanes and the Huxleys, introduced me to her family’s name of contempt for scientists who are blind to everything but science. They called them “Welders.” We use that quite a bit.
We called chicken “nangi” for years because it was our oldest daughter’s toddler name for it.
aimai
@Paul in KY:
That’s a navy term, isn’t it?
raven
Our cocker is named Lil Bit but we have a friend with a dog-loving son with a developmental disability. He can’t pronounce her name so he calls here “Webee” and it really fits her. Now we called here that and “the weeber”. Raven was called “Boo-Boo” and, even though he’s been gone five years. we call each other Mr and Mrs Boo-Boo. My old man was the king of making up names for stuff. We live in La Jolla when he was in the Navy and would take “famous ancient” hikes on the beach and find all kinds of stuff. The LA County Fair in Pomona used to have this poster up all over and somehow the “going my way sir pig” became the “goomieser pig” to us. I could go on and on and on.
Oh, here’s one. When I was in Korea the local folks had trouble saying “same”, it came out “sameo”. We always said “sameo sameo” and I believe that is where “same old same old” came from.
jak
We call oven mitts romneys.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Remember Not Necessarily the News?
WereBear
My grandmother was awesome with such, some of which I discovered was regionally based (mangled German, mostly.)
Before dinner we had to wash our “paddywhackers.” A table that didn’t sit square was “whopper jawed.” A sneeze was blessed with “Kasnoogie!”
donnah
@OzarkHillbilly:
I immediately was struck by the use of “anigogglin” (however it’s spelled) by your grandmother. I make hooked rugs, and there is a technique for filling in background spaces where you meander left and right with the loops, creating a higgledy-piggledy sort of pattern. Rughookers in certain regions of the country call it anigoggling.
Interesting!
Schlemizel
Wish I could post an image in here. This is a one panel cartoon that is so perfect for BJ
http://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2013/03/12
If I were any good at photoshop I would paste Tunch into the cat on this cartoon
aimai
@Betty Cracker:
Here in New England I was raised calling all sodas “Tonics.” You buy your “Tonic” at a “Spa.” That usage has largely dissapeared in the last twenty years or so. We still have “Spas” which are little neighborhood grocery stores that sell cigarettes, tonic, newspapers, sandwiches, and some canned goods.
I recommend this book all the time on the internet but I heartily recommend David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed. It has a section on the vocabulary and syntax of the four major folkways in US history and you will often find out that your unique family idiolect is just an offshoot of a major branch of some ethnic/cultural/regional dialect. There are a lot of things that midwesterner’s say, for example, that stem from the original atlantic region of settlement from which they dispersed.
FridayNext
@NotMax:
I’m curious why it would have to be gay? There are female sumo wrestlers.
Why’d you go with gay?
Interesting…..
greennotGreen
My niece, Holly Caitlin, didn’t speak until she was three due to a developmental problem with her mouth. But once she started speaking, she had no problem picking up the extensive vocabulary of her scientist-parents, so much so that they began to call the use of any longer-word-than-necessary a “hollicaition”.
Keith
Just refer to the toilet paper rolls as “steamrollers”, and people should know what you are talking about. (If they don’t, then they probably don’t smoke weed, and you just play it off)
nemesis
I used that same tp roll as a pipe back in the day. Cut a small square in the roll, take a piece aluminium foil slightly larger than the cut square, poke small holes in the foil, insert foil into square opening, fill, light, repeat.
As kids, for some unknown reason, when a person stood up leaving their seat unclaimed, another person would steal that seat and exclaim “jellyroll!”
daveX99
@Kathi: It’s because you hold them up to your mouth, and then go ‘DER DER’ into it. Sounds awesome. All echo-y.
Betty Cracker
@aimai: I remember “tonics!” I lived in Boston for a few years, and I don’t remember hearing stores called “spas,” but I do remember “tonics” for “sodas,” “elastics” for “rubber bands” and “barrels” for “trash cans.”
maurinsky
My younger one made up a name for my boobs when she was nursing – she called them tuffies.
My gran used to sing what we called aye deedle songs, which is where there aren’t any lyrics – these were Irish tunes, and the articulations would be on syllables like “aye-dil-eedle, aye-dilee”. She was also great for placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble. So she would make us eat our vegeTAbles, and she liked to hear us say the alPHAbet.
My parents both use the term eejit, which is idiot said with a brogue.
boctaoe
When I lived in Marietta, GA, we called Hwy#41 “4-lane”as how it was the biggest road around, (before#75) Now I live in south Florida near Hwy#41 and still call it “4-lane”to the amusement of others.
WereBear
And yes, I love sniglets. To this day I buy the kind of heavy cream which has the popout thing on the side, and what I think is: “This will avoid lactomangulation.”
NotMax
@FridayNext
Mostly because the traditional official Japanese Sumo Association is a male domain.
Nothing more, nothing less.
maurinsky
My younger one made up a name for my boobs when she was nursing – she called them tuffies.
Oh, she also made up a name for her special blanket, which was really more a sound than a name – it was a glottal stop in her throat, kind of sounded like “gnn-gnn”. My ex husband couldn’t say it, she he called her blanket her gunka.
My gran used to sing what we called aye deedle songs, which is where there aren’t any lyrics – these were Irish tunes, and the articulations would be on syllables like “aye-dil-eedle, aye-dilee”. She was also great for placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble. So she would make us eat our vegeTAbles, and she liked to hear us say the alPHAbet.
My parents both use the term eejit, which is idiot said with a brogue.
Highway Rob
The day after Douglas Adams’ birthday and no one’s posted this set of neologisms yet?
Meaning of Liff
FeudalismNow!
My family winds up with a bunch of pet names for objects from kids when they are learning to speak. Windshield wiper fluid is boola-boola squirt, lip gloss is nip goss, and Sleeping Beauty is just Booty.
Not in the same exact vein, but my kindergartner just brought back her Abraham Lincoln portrait. He is, in her eyes, African-American. She said she just wanted him to look like a president. Made me smile.
ixnay
@aimai:
Oh, and a thick milk shake, with ice cream, is (was?) a “frappe.” I once asked for a chocolate milk shake, and got, essentially, chocolate milk.
In Baltimore, when I was growing up, the sidewalk was the “pavement.” Pronounced “payment.”
A whole ‘nother thread could be done on “Bawlmorese.”
Matt McIrvin
The soda/pop/coke terms are just regional dialect:
http://www.popvssoda.com/
Baud
I just call everything I don’t know the name of “thingy.” It’s amazing how many thingies there are in this world. And the number keeps increasing as I get older.
Emily
In my family, a dog’s licking you on the face was a blubbie. I mean, what else are you going to call it?
Svensker
We call showers “meh-SHUGS” (short for meshugenah Mike, don’t ask) and pronounce apoplectic as “ah-pop-ah-LEC-tic”. The latter has completely taken over the correct pronunciation and occasionally slips out in outside conversation.
NotMax
@ixnay
In Rhode Island, and only in Rhode Island, a milk shake is a “cabinet.”
Rustydude
The word “rocket” to indicate any thing. In fact, a substitute for the word thing. As in… where’d you get that rocket?
Cris (without an H)
@Paul in KY: Awesome, my friends invented that same thing in parallel.
lojasmo
My family doesn’t do that…ever.
unimaginative, I suppose.
Paul in KY
@aimai: Could be (I don’t know, but if you say it is a Navy term, will not be arguing). The father of those who said it was USAF. Maybe he heard it from Navy people when he was on a troop ship or something like that.
gogol's wife
@Tokyokie:
My mother had “dillywacker” (you can guess what it means), which I thought she had made up until I read Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice. It’s apparently a variant of the dialect term “tallywacker.”
aimai
We called the children’s private parts “putis” when they were little. Its the Nepali proper term for a vajayajay and we figured we were going to end up talking about them quite a bit in public so we ought to have a term we could all use without upsetting people. Its quite interesting how certain words move up from children’s speech to adult–when I was a child no one used the phrase “nanana boo boo” but thirty five years later when I had children that was the phrase children (and their parents) used to indicate something for which we had some other term. When I was a child teachers all used the word “rear” for a child’s “bottom” and if you were told to sit down in a chair that was the word used. When I had children in preschool and grade school teachers routinely used the word “bum” or “butt”–this honestly shocked me more than a regular swear/curse word. It had been considered so vulgar when I was a child that I had never heard anyone in a position of authority or education say it.
greenergood
As children, before we went out or to bed, we weren’t asked if we’d had a shit or defecated, but if we’d ‘made boo’. Can’t remember what the yellow liquid was called.
In my house, the doofer is the remote.
And here in Scotland, they call soft drinks like coke and pepsi ‘juice’, just to illustrate how healthy our diet is here …
Paul in KY
@nemesis: Did you cover one end of the roll opening with your hand?
RobNYNY1957
That sounds like the German/Yiddish word for moldy/spoiled (verschimmelt).
The Fat Kate Middleton
Is ‘binkie’ a common sniglet? Because when I first used it with my daughters-in-law, they looked puzzled. I explained that it meant pacifier, and that’s what our family has used ever since. And as for the word popek (sp), all of us who live in a city that’s home of the National Czech Museum are very familiar with it (even those of us of Irish descent). We like to use the word when brzzing our babies’ tummies.
NotMax
@Paul in KY
It’s been in somewhat common use* since at least WWI, though its origins are muddled.
Also too, has been the trademark name of several different companies which manufactured undies over the last century.
*common enough to occasionally be used in movies of the 30s and 40s.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@aimai: Our little grandsons, children of a Japanese mother, have always known their parts as ‘chin-chin’ .
aimai
@NotMax:
In English English it also means a “maid of all work” and in Australian English it means a specific kind of underwear.
I think that its interesting to note that words spread out through ethnic/regional usages into popular use through places of mass mobilization such as Military groups (Army/Navy/Air Force etc… and schools and prisons. They then relocate into families which may believe that the word is unique to their family when it was just borrowed from another place/time/community by one influential family member.
Paul in KY
@Cris (without an H): Necessity is the mother of invention!
Feudalism Now!
Sniglets!
Bevamirage- the band of plastic around the bottom of some soda bottles so you can’t see how much soda is left.
My favorite is barkuum – having the dog clean up any dropped food.
Paul in KY
@aimai: My born-English mother (now 87) was shocked when she saw the posters for ‘The Spy who Shagged Me’.
NotMax
@aimai
IIRC, that is “skivvy” – generally used as a singular term.
Also too, a slang term for Japanese, prevalent on the U.S. West Coast (before WWII), was “skibby” or “skibbies.”
wonkie
Grocs. Short for groceries. Somehow “shop for groceries” turned into “hop for grocs.”
Paul in KY
@NotMax: Thank you for the info on that.
Paul in KY
@aimai: Good point.
Gin & Tonic
Huh. And here I thought this thread would get into Wittgenstein’s argument against “private language”, and whether Kripke’s interpretation of the argument was correct or not.
Ash Can
Shortly after Bottle Rocket was born, I learned that M-80 and his mother called these cardboard tubes (especially the ones from paper towel rolls) “doot-doots,” onomatopoeic for the tooting sound one makes through them to amuse folks such as the then-tiny Bottle Rocket.
Rosalita
a Subaru was a ruby-sue to us back when we first got one in the 70s, and still is today. Otherwise, my parents were a little low on the creativity meter.
Schlemizel
@Gex:
On the other hand a “buttload” is an actual measurement. A butt is a type of a barrel, IIRC it is 126 gallons.
slightly off thread: There is a tale from the middle ages of a man who believes he is being cuckolded and thinks the other man is hiding in a butt. he goes in to check, his wife leans over the edge to watch him & here paramour comes up behind her and takes her in . . . well you get the pun.
Raven
@boctaoe: Are you from there? Buncha rock and rollers from there here in Athens.
artem1s
I grew up in the country and when I moved to the city, I was delighted to discover that the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street had a name. In my particular city we call them tree lawns. I just loved the sound it, don’t know why. And for some reason it just tickles me that each city has a different way of referring to that particular patch of land. weird.
I refer to collections of things, more than 2 and less than five as ‘a couple, three’. Until a friend of mine laughed about it, I had no idea I was even using it or that it was in any way unusual. I think its an Appalachian thing. My family also used the term ijit (idiot). Which I also assumed was Appalachian but realize its probably older and Scots/Irish.
John PM
When I was 6 or 7 my dad got a new recliner. He was very proud of the price he paid and kept referring to it as “a deal.” My sister and I thought that was the name of the chair and started calling it “The Deal.”
Cassidy
What? No one has started using the bathroom and referring to it as a a “ted&hellen”? I thought that’d be universal by now.
Raven
You want to see where the term “shotgun” cmae from?
NotMax
Etymology and also how words change meaning over time are endlessly fascinating.
One favorite example is the word “silly” – which originally meant deeply, deeply devout and religious.
Karounie
In our family, the act of pulling a turtleneck or other tight-collared shirt over the head of a child – so that for a moment their face is covered by cloth until it pops free is called “plouffing.” (verb, as in “OK, I’m gonna plouffe you now.”) We started this when our 9y/old was a toddler – so, before we had heard of David Plouffe. But since then we do find his name sorta funny.
p.a.
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: what TV show used to have a segment about viewer-invented sniglets? I can’t remember…
vitaminC
We always called spatulas frammers. I have no idea why.
p.a.
@NotMax: but a cabinet isn’t just a milkshake. A cabinet consists of milk, ice cream, and syrup (of the same flavor as the ice cream. Best is the coffee cabinet autocrat or eclipse coffee syrup. (I think one bought out the other but keeps producing both labels) “You’ll smack your lips when it’s Eclipse!”
narya
@Gin & Tonic: Well, it doesn’t really meet Wittgenstein’s notion of private language, in that more than one person is using it.
My brother refers to any random thing as a mergatmacater or a goomzion (goom-zee-an), or goomzie, for short. The stepbrother of another friend coined the word “jij” (spelling unknown), which means any random, unidentifiable bit of goop or goo.
RobNYNY1957
An odd new usage (last 10 years or so), at least here in NYC: When people want to agree emphatically agree with something, they say “yes, no” or “yeah, no”:
Did you like the movie?
Yeah, no, it was really great!
Barney
‘Sniglets’ and ‘The Meaning of Liff’ share a common origin – John Lloyd, collaborator with Douglas Adams, and producer of ‘Not the Nine o’Clock News’, which transferred to the USA as ‘Not Necessarily the News’. See http://eeeeeegp.com/NotGiants/Projects/Adams.html .
The one I remember from the NtNoCN annuals which didn’t make it into the Liff book (because it wasn’t based on a place name) was ‘fot’ – ‘the sound made by breaking the seal on a new jar of coffee’.
Barney
@RobNYNY1957: One from the Meaning of Liff book (ie it’s a place name): “Yesnaby: A ‘yes, maybe’ which means ‘no’.”
aimai
@RobNYNY1957: I’vw noticed that one too.
The “no” serves some other function there than pure negation.
It looks like the (also common) phrase “Yeah. No” which is pure negation (Had it used on me in France when a person used this phrase “Oui. Mais, non” which meant “One might at first glance think you are correct and entitled to do X but actually I am going to prevent you without engaging in argument or pointing to the rule by which I will deny you.” “Yeah. No.” In this usage means “I heard you but I deny the validity of what you are saying.” Your new version of “Yeah, No” is very teenage and it seems to mean “I enthusiastically like X and will now defend that proposition against an assumed interlocutor who would argue with me and challenge my perspective. What follows will be a slightly longer disquisition on this subject.”
orogeny
We always called them da doot da doos (sp?), because they made good horns. I can’t remember which one, but some comedian from the late 50s-early 60s used to talk about that in their standup routine.
the lost puppy
My brother and I used to make up words:
a beautymark was a “boostoo”
a fancy goatee was a “jawjit”
and a full beard was a “Santa Claus Faustau”
we’d call our dad “Du-dud-den” sometimes
We also used to stick bologna on the walls and say, “the wall has a boostoo!” — my poor mom, of course, had to clean that up before our dad got home and went ballistic.
We hung our sister’s doll in the closet. I didn’t like dolls, only stuffed animals. However, there was an episode where my dad had to climb a tree to get a stuffed bear which somehow magically traveled to the top of the tree.
We had a very “Mr. Bill” type of sense of humor where we used to put our GI Joes and my Barbie dolls through all sorts of horrible trials and tribulations. We created our own show with a male action figure called “The Will the Live” — one day, he finally ended up on top of our house.
However, we turned out to be completely normal adults. No seriously, we’re just fine.
:)
shortstop
My husband and I have quite a few of them, but I can only remember them in context. This one came up last night: “Boo Radley” as a euphemism for scary.
“I didn’t like going through that pitch-dark alley.”
“I know; it was totally Boo Radley.”
grumpy realist
My roommate and I came up with our own term for the young men who would hang around us incessantly moping (we were at MIT): wet kittens.
My mother ended up picking up a lot of MIT slang (without realizing it) and using it in conversation, much to the bewilderment of her associates. “Mung” is a good example.(Recursive acronym: MUNG until no good.)
RobNYNY1957
Boo Radley was the scary neighbor in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
redoubt
@boctaoe: How close to the Big Chicken?
In my house there’s clirty. Clothes worn once or twice, not dirty but not 100% clean either.
Phylllis
@Betty Cracker: I can clearly remember family gatherings where someone would ask “Who wants a coke?” With the next question being “what do you want?”, and replies ranging from 7-Up, to root beer, and even Pepsi. Because there’s always an outlier.
Raven
@RobNYNY1957: Robert DuVall
kindness
Ya know, I stopped making smoking devices & pipes several years ago. I just can’t blow my own glass so I buy those and these days I’m more a vaporizor toker. I don’t think Heathkit makes those so I buy those too.
Nice Star Wars reference though. May the Schwartz be with you.
anon
I thought “dead, gay, or Jewish?” was an actual parlor game people played with respect to Hollywood stars.
'Niques
@RobNYNY1957:
Thank you for that … Yes, Dad was of German descent, and had been raised in a Jewish neighborhood. Makes much sense.
And “skivies” was his term for underwear, from his Navy days.
Soylent Green
Kadiddle — what we kids called a car with one headlight.
boctaoe
@Raven: Nope,spent 25 years there raising my children. Great place for that.
imonlylurking
I’ve never made up a word that I use now-my sister and i had quite the code talk going when we were kids but none of it carried over to adulthood. I use the snigglet ‘eleceleration’ often. Then I cackle with glee as everybody else in the lobby looks blank.
HelloRochester
My kid has a heart defect and so has spent a bit of time in hospitals and we’re fanatical about hand sanitizer when we’re there. When he was 2, he called it “hanitizer” and it stuck.
JF
@Kathi: In the book “A Child’s Garden of Grass” the author named them dur-durs because when you were a little kid, you took a dur-dur and went around the house going “dur-dur” thru it like it was a horn or a megaphone. At least that’s how I remember it.
boctaoe
@redoubt: We ate at “PoFoks”, now lost to pc.
boctaoe
@redoubt: We ate at “PoFoks”, now lost to pc.
John
@Kathi:
Der-der is the term my dad uses for them! I thought that was made up!!
ETA: I now see that this has been hashed out. I see that my dad got it from a 70’s book/comedy album about marijuana. Classic.
Jay C
@chopper: @nemesis:
Yep, that’s the proper method of construction, all right: I did this once for a couple we met on a Windjammer cruise, who had brought the proper, ummm, filling along, but neglected (or were afraid to) buy papers. They looked at me when I finished like I was Thomas Edison or something: amazingly, they had never seen or heard of a goodle pipe….
Or it’s glass version, the “carburetor”….
Paul in KY
@redoubt: Like that one!
different-church-lady
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
gypsy howell
My daughter didn’t find out until she went to college that handicapped spaces aren’t commonly known as “polio parking.”
She was so pissed at us.
LanceThruster
I like the made up terms from Adult Swim cartoons –
In “Squidbillies” Early Cuyler denied paternity by declaring, “Twarn’t me what bangulated and pregnified her.”
A friend’s toddler godchild mangled cartoon catch phrases routinely.
“IbiDOO” was “yabba-dabba-doo” and “EEbaLAWler” was somehow Speedy Gonzales’ “Arriba, arriba, andele, andele, eypa, eypa(sp?)” which could be stretched out by her for comic effect with “EEbaLAWWWWWWler.”
My two favorite sniglets are “musquirt” (the yellow liquid that preceeds the mustard out of a squeeze bottle), and “gashole” (people who cut through corner gas station lots to avoid waiting to turn at the signal).
Lauren
@Soylent Green: We call that “padiddle”, and I think it must be regional, because other folks know what it is.
BethanyAnne
Idjit isn’t Scots Irish. It’s Bugs Bunnyish :)
scav
Most have sunk so deep I can’t even distinguish them — a few people based ones stick out. Taking a Ronnie is taking a nap (which is at least explicable) but we generally get stared at when we ask for the Saysors Chavez. Two pivoted blades are expected, nothing more.
hitchhiker
pootsie = fart
erpy = nauseous
crunchles = any kind of salty crunchy snack
I love this thread.
Nylund
Whenever anyone in the family whines or plays up a minor inconvenience for sympathy, my wife responded with a sarcastic “Oh poor muffin,” which became simply “muffin,” then through some weird linguistic process of an exaggerated sarcastic voice devolved into the nonsense word “mooshboosh.”
Now, if someone starts whining or complaining about something small, they’ll face a mocking chorus of “mooshboosh” from the rest of the family.
It also has a more tender and affection use. Like, after a rough day, if said sweetly as a request, it means, “I need comforting,” prompting whomever is closest to come over and provide a hug.
From there, a variant came about used as a generic placeholder name for any loved one (or pet), in the form of either mooshka or booshka.
Mooshka and Booshka are interchangeable, but can be used together when you’re referring to numerous people/pets, eg. “Where are mooshka and booshka?” which could refer to the kids, or the cat and the dog, or, from the kids, mom and dad.
There are endless variants on these terms including things like mooshker/booshker, mowser/bowser (rhymes with cow). Pretty much any nonsense pair that starts with M and/or B and contains a S, SH, or Z sound will be understood. The rest of the sounds are chosen at random to fit the mood (excited, hyper, bored, sick, etc.)
It’s just devolved into chaos now and has infected other words. Love became things like loosh and loshe, which someone once attempted to write down in a note, which was misunderstood to read 10she (ten she) and, originally as a joke, entered the family vernacular. It is now used in earnest, “Do you still ten she me? Yes, I still ten she you.” or, “I ten she my booshka” or “I loshe my mooshka.”
So yeah, when we’re all out in public, sometimes we sound like a bunch of weirdos that use some strange baby-talk language to communicate…all because of one sarcastic muffin.
Families are weird.
I am not a kook
When I was a kid, whenever two kids would say the same thing at the same time, they would exclaim “Shakespeare!” and “Longfellow!”. I still have no clue where this came from – this wasn’t even an English speaking country…
handsmile
Another Bay State-centric (as far I know) word: “bubbler” for “water fountain.”
For me and my childhood siblings, defecation was referred to as “grunties” (for, um, obvious reasons).
@gypsy howell:
That’s a hilarious anecdote!
Kathi
@ixnay:
Well, that makes sense since I used to have the book.
Yutsano
Over 130 comments and no one mentions Jabberwocky?
Paul in KY
@gypsy howell: I bet she was!!
Paul in KY
@LanceThruster: I do gashole occasionally.
Tehanu
@hitchhiker:
Omigosh. My family always called a fart a “poot” — not a “pootsie,” but heck, that’s close enough. I never heard it anywhere else.
When my little brother was about 4 (he’s 57 now) he came up with “hassgropper” and we still call them that.
@I am not a kook:
I first read about that in a Dorothy Sayers book. It’s not necessarily Shakespeare and Longfellow; it’s any two poets.
OzarkHillbilly
@jprfrog:
Huh. The things I don’t know. Thanx.
OzarkHillbilly
@donnah:
Interesting indeed.
Morticum
“Sharf” is the action of brush-clapping your hands across one another satisfactorily after a job well done.
Ted
My mom has some classics, mostly invented on the spot when at a loss for the real word. Ask for the hole-punch, she’ll say the “clippy-clippy” etc. But my two favorites are the generic thing word “doobries”–which could be your balls, but could be anything really.
The other thing–talking about doobries–she’d say during my bath time as a little kid was warning me not to slip getting out of the tub, was “Be careful and don’t split your difference.”
I’ve said this a few time describing some accident and I’ve received the weirdest looks.
hope
That’s actually a “derder”, because that’s the noise you make when you put it to you mouth and march around the house
scav
There’s also vocabulary slippage that sticks: Mom once asked us to download the dishes and set the table (late 70s very early 80s to to make it sadder).
Miki
The 2nd-Ex (RIP) told me the medical term for a morning erection was “Eroknee.” I believed him. For years and years and years I believed him. I think we had been divorced for about 3 years (but still good friends) when he finally told me the truth – it’s called a Morning Torker.
Gawd I miss that man …..
Miki
@NotMax: In fact, pidgin English in Hawaii is known as Da Kine talk …. Great book from Univeristy Press of Hawaii called “Da Kine Talk,” by Elizabeth Ball Carr.
joel hanes
@ixnay:
Der-der … A Child’s Garden of Grass
Yes. An in that learned work, the exact etymology is given: it’s called a der-der because, when you were four or five, you used to march around the house holding it over your mouth and singing “Der der der der”. As, apparently, did everyone.
joel hanes
@joel hanes:
Ah. I see Dave has beat me to it.
joel hanes
@joel hanes: In fact, half the commentariat has beat me to it.
Maybe we didn’t all march around the house going “Der der”, but an uncommonly large fraction of us seem to have read a popular book about recreational drugs — or our parents have.
JoyfulA
@ixnay: A sidewalk was a payment in PA Dutch central Pennsylvania, too. It’s one of those words that surprised me with how they were spelled when I was learning to read (like winda vs. window).
Jamie
My former parter and I used to call pot chicken. That happened because we bought a really disturbing pot pipe made from a chicken’s foot and an acorn. Not actually responsive, but it seemed appropriate. Thankfully, I’ve since become a responsible person and don’t do that anymore. I drink instead.
More responsive: Snuffles is the go-to word for anyone who’s name I can’t remember. which is a lot of people.
JoyfulA
@Paul in KY: As was a Scot invited in South Carolina to go to a shag (dance) party.
A2B3
I’m surprised I haven’t seen “boofer” or “boof” here yet. That was my family’s word for fart. I was told at one point that it was derived from the Portuguese word for clown, “bufo” or the term for the “noise that clowns make”, but we knew those noises as raspberries, or watermelons if done on the stomach.
John M. Burt
We have an elaborate domestic dialect,* grown from words inadvertently coined by children learning to talk,** words deliberately invented,*** and words manufactured because there’s no good reason to use the same word every single time.****
I’m also fond of deliberately using words which have been rejected by the OED as not being words anyone has ever actually used.*****
*When we adopted three children from overseas and heard them using in-house words, we remembered the joke about the Yiddish-speaking Chinese waiter at the kosher deli and said to one another, “Shhh! He thinks he’s learning English!”
**Child: Look at this. [Holds up small doll.]
Parent: That’s a cute little guy.
Child: Guy? [Calls all humanoid toys “guys” thereafter, a term which is even written on a storage container for GUYS.]
***Parent to misbehaving child: Don’t be a wooga-wooga.
****i.e., replacing “surmised” with “surmose”.
***** http://john_m_burt.blogspot.com/2005/10/icre-of-scized-sardels.html
MikeJake
My dad used to take me on walks through the park, on a trail that circled a pond. Whenever we first approached the pond, he’d point out the pond scum and say “Look at all that snog frot.”
Later, on a field trip to a local nature preserve, I pointed out the ‘snog frot’ to our guide, who had no idea what the hell I was talking about. My dad really enjoyed that, the dick.
Older
@scav: My son once remarked that it was time to defrag the spice shelf.
John M. Burt
@John M. Burt: And then there is the coinage of a word to make a distinction other people don’t make, as in the drawer marked STUFF, NO THINGS.
Several people have mentioned “A Child’s Garden of Grass”, which reminds me that one of the notations on our first child’s “first year milestones” calendar is, “Begins Learning Advanced Games”.
Oh, and [email protected]: http://johnmburt.tumblr.com/post/45212666564/this-goes-with-comment-42-by-schlemizel-here
You’re welcome. :{ )
The Other Chuck
When I was in school, this new computer game came out that everyone was playing, namely Wolfenstein 3D. It had Soundblaster support, complete with voice. Some of the Nazis would announce themselves as SS, i.e. they’d say “Schutztaffel”. Except the sound was so muffled sounding, I just couldn’t make it out at all, and back then I didn’t know the word (pretty pathetic considering I’d had three years of German in high school). So me and my roommate decided they were saying “Moosewaffles”.
So now whenever I can’t hear someone because they’re muffled or mumbling, I blurt out “Moosewaffles?”
@Schlemizel: There’s a pretty decent brand of holiday beer called “Santa’s Butt”. Not quite as good as Criminally Bad Elf though, another seasonal brew from the same company.
jefft452
Slightly OT because it’s not completely made up, but the Vietnam era slang word “Hinkey”
You need a word for “everything looks OK, but something is wrong. I don’t know what it is or why I feel that way, but something is wrong”
scav
@Older: I am so adding that to the collection!
LanceThruster
@Paul in KY:
Me too. Sometimes it’s the only escape route.
LanceThruster
I recently made up two words for when people smoke medical marijuana mostly for fun —
Recredicinal & Medcreational.
They both mean the same thing…only different.
One other fun bit language trivia is the multiple meanings for “fuck” and “dude.”
NotMax
@Lance Thruster
There’s even a term for those types of constructions: portmanteau words.
LanceThruster
The Mormon mom across the street where I grew up used to swear by hollering, “DADGUMMIT!”
We need a sub-category for altered swears. I like Farscapes “frelling.” I also like that Heinlein’s “grok” made it into the lexicon (though ‘grok’ is not a swear).
So it goes.
Oh btw, I would highly recommend Jim Lehrer’s “The Story of English” in either book form or PBS series. Amazing information on word, phrase, and idiom origins (like “the real McCoy”)
Algebrateacher
@Kathi:
Those inside rolls are called “Der ders.” My source is the book A Child’s Garden of Grass.
LanceThruster
@NotMax:
Thx. I forgot about that. I learned that word a long time ago looking up “mondegreens” as in “Lady Mondegreen.”
Jebediah
@FeudalismNow!:
Me too!
Aaron
Since you asked…I am hoping these catch on:
UMA- baby mother and we are not together.
ABU- baby’s father and we are not together.
Usage: “Hey isnt that your girlfriend over there (points to person on other side of room at party)?”
“Nope, Ex-girlfriend, she’s my Uma, we only talk when I pick up Jr. for the weekend.”
Meanwhile on the other side of the room-
“Hey isnt that your ex over there? He’s kinda hot, mind if I ask him out?”
“He’s my Abu, we only did it once and I would rather if you didn’t”
“Oh, I didnt know you two had a kid together?”
“Yeah, I got drunk one night and we did it. Now Im stuck with him as an Abu for the next 19 years. And he’s an ass.”
LanceThruster
More toddler speak. A friend’s Mexican/Polish heritage godchild used “gogo” for “boo-boo” and scary apparitions are “shouse” (rhymes with ‘cows”) and “kurtz” (rhymes with “hurts”). We could never glean where she got it when we tried asking her when she was older (she didn’t even remember it later).
I was with her when she was pushing her doll stroller on a nighttime walk when she bumped her cart into the curb at the dead-end because she wasn’t watching where she was going. She looked up into the thick bushes there and declared, “Shouse! Kurtz!” I saw she was truly startled so I picked her up with one arm and drug the stroller along with the other. The whole 50 yard walk back to the house, she’d look behind us, and then lean in close to me and whisper, “shouse…kurtz.” Her godmother was able to get from her the next day that she saw a ghost lady in blue, but that was about it.
We guessed maybe, “shadows…ghosts?”
Kathi
@joel hanes:
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed that.
joel hanes
My very-nice mother’s favorite curseword :
“Foopydoodle”
and when something is not properly aligned, it’s
“all kittywampus”
Her German-ancestry family used “Snickelfritz” as the fond name of any young child, or a foolish/bumpkin adult.
“C’mere, Snickelfritz, and let me wash your face.”
pattonbt
We called it a doob-tube
steverino
My grandmother called the bits of scrap left from cutting paper “schnivels”. Her parents were from Germany, but she lived in North Jersey (lots of Jewish folk, at least by the time I lived there) so it could have been Yiddish.
In the Navy (submarines, at least) we called cubbyholes “pukas”, Hawaiian for little cave. And one chief got everyone using “tighten up,” as in, “do me this favor, and later I’ll tighten you up.” I suspect that is from the 60’s song (Archie Bell and the Drells!).
When picking up a cat (as a child) my mother would always admonish me to “support their local bottom”, meaning don’t grab them around the waist and let them hang. It was only recently that I got the joke: a reference to the James Garner movies “Support Your Local Sheriff / Gunfighter.” She has been gone many years now, so I can’t let her know I get it. I am usually a bit quicker on the uptake, but haven’t had anyone to similarly admonish until my grand-nieces started visiting.
Louis
There’s a lot of cross over cop/ criminal/lawyer slang I like. When you go to jail here you can get a lag ( less than two years) or a big Huey. Big Huey = Huey Long of louisiana fame. How in christs name a bunch of new Zealand cons came up with that I do not know. Crook slang is great. Once you master it you enter a tiny little closed world. Pretty funny watching fine legal minds in expensive suits sounding like boobs (convicts- don’t ask me) shining on a broken arse.
Ivy
My daughter named the turn signal a knicknocker — the sound, you know — I have to remind myself not to refer to it that way to the mechanic.
Any night where I did not make a new dinner and require everyone to sit down together has been known forever as ‘pick-up.’ As in “is there real dinner or is it pick-up?”
Fleece jackets are always known as fuzzies.
Cygil
In one of my friend’s households, where most kids would call something “gay” or “lame”, their word was “Jewish.” As in, “that’s so Jewish”, or “You’re such a Jew.” It took until I was about 10 or 11 to understand what anti-semitism was and what the purpose of that insult was.
Does that count?
KrisWV
All of the best ones in my family are named for people, and should probably be kept private, since they tend to reduce actual people we knew to one trait. But the world must know of the noun and verb “fasteau” — meaning to leave an event early to avoid the traffic. You know the folks who leave the concert before the encore, or the last movement of the symphony, or the baseball game after the bottom of the 8th — now you can say “look at those fasteaus!” or “I am not fasteau-ing Cheap Trick — I’ll miss Surrender”.
Named after friends of my parents, who more than likely said “look at the Fasteaus leaving before the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth”. Over the years, my siblings and I have pretty much figured out that relationships between fasteaus and normal people just don’t work.
Ruckus
@Andrea:
I use “testostaroni” (pronounced like rice a roni) when guys are acting like douchenozzles.
Ruckus
@Keith:
That works another way as well.
The paper that comes on the roll is used to clean up after steamers.
Ruckus
@Soylent Green:
We used kadialac for a one eyed car.
Ruckus
@Older:
Used to nuke the piles of paper in my office. When I was done there was nothing left but the furniture.
Paul in KY
@LanceThruster: Some of my friends back in teenaged years would say this when swearing around adults: ‘Godfrey Damnulson’
Were some others, but I have forgotten them. Just use standard swear words now (sigh).
Older
@scav: heh, thanks Scav! Right now our whole house needs to be defragged.
Older
@Miki: On a related subject (to this entire thread — “How not to grow the hell up” ): There’s a garden nursery near where we live called “Morning Wood”, and yes, we snicker every time we pass their booth at the Farmers’ Market.