household phrases

[42itous]

Do you have a word or phrase that your family or friends understand but a stranger wouldn't?

I came across this quotation: "I had a friend who used to say 'I’m on the rollerskates' to mean her period, as a reference to those daft Tampax ads where the actress skated around in white jeans."

In my family, we refer to the "as-you," which is the place you put things when they're on their way somewhere but you're not going to bother bringing them there now. I.e. Dad puts newspaper clippings at the bottom of the stairs, and the next time someone goes up, they bring the newspaper clippings up to his desk. Or we put mail in the as-you by the front door.

majordomo and I were given a Santoku knife for our wedding. We got married at the height of the Sudoku puzzle craze. We call it the Sudoku knife.

I use "triffid" in place of "trivet." I actually have trouble saying the proper word. Luckily, it's easy for people not of my immediate family to tell what I mean from context.

Comments

family words & phrases

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

The only "family words" I can think of were merely foreign words-- Russian, Polish, German, or Yiddish (the first three from my mother, the last from my dad). However, we did sometimes modify and expand usage of the foreign words. For example, any cat's name could have the prefix "Ooshki-" (Russian for "little ears", IIRC) or the suffix "-katze" (German "cat") attached ("Tabby-katze!"), or the cat's actual name could be deleted altogether and "Ooshki-katze" used instead. Particularly when skritching the cat behind the ears.

Oh, and some of the foreign words we used were weirdly dialectical. For example, when growing up I thought "itza-krema" was the actual Polish word for ice cream, but actually the only people who used it were immigrants to Hamtramck, Detroit, Michigan, where my mom's family lived for several months after coming to the U.S. in 1952. The Hamtramck denizens also used other "English words modified to sound Polish", like "kor-nedz-eh" for corner, but that one didn't get adopted into our family usage.

Our family had phrases we used, though. For example, anytime we'd take a different driving route than usual (on purpose, out of boredom, or because we missed a turn), we'd say "avoiding kidnappers" as the catch-all explanation. It's originally taken from some article my dad read in the 1970s, about varying one's route so as not to be predictable. Since my dad often liked taking different routes to experiment (e.g. "maybe this new route is more efficient at certain times of day"), the phrase provided him with a Mom-proof excuse. Since I also like taking different routes, I adopted it. In fact, I just used "avoiding kidnappers" twice in the past week.

Re: family words & phrases

[42itous.livejournal.com]

That reminds me, when I was a kid we pronounced ice cream "itchy crayum," based on a [possibly apocryphal] immigrant ancestor's mispronunciation.

I love how language eddies within small communities when multiple languages come into contact.