We have “Password”. My mom decided to tease my sister one night as she was out on the back porch; she locked the screen door and demanded the password. Without even thinking, my sister blurted out “Fuck you, Mom” - this was the first time I believe my sister, then 16, had dropped the F-bomb within parental earshot.
“Uncle X and Uncle Y” . . . except that we use their real names.
This happened about 80 years ago. Uncle X was only 10 years old and Uncle Y (who wasn’t an uncle yet, but dating an aunt) was in his 20s. Uncle Y came into town from Texas, all dressed in Texas drag, complete with a holster containing a loaded gun. When he met little Uncle X, he said “Hey kid, bet you’ve never seen a real gun,” after which he handed his gun to Uncle X . . . who took it, pointed it at Uncle Y, and pulled the trigger. Uncle Y was in the hospital for many months, and almost died several times. They say his heart jumped from the left side to the right, but I don’t believe that part.
So when we say “Uncle X and Uncle Y,” it’s our way of saying “The Darwin Awards” (although Uncle Y did survive to reproduce) . . . or anything a person does that’s just mind-numbingly stupid.
Just remembered another one:
When I was a kid, my youngest aunt lived with us for a while. One night she went out on a date, and invited the guy inside when they got back. They were sitting on the couch talking when suddenly the unmistakable odor of fart wafted through the air. Each of them was thinking how rude the other was, and they were both ready to call off any possibility of seeing each other again . . . when the drapes behind the couch moved, and the dog crawled out from below. (That dog was famous for its farts.) They both burst out laughing . . . but sadly, she never saw him again.
Now, whenever someone farts, someone says “Is the dog under the couch?”
My father in law is famous for making up useless phrases used in the family.
We use the word “beeda” when we no longer want to continue a conversation. It is used mostly when the other participant is ranting about something or other. Inserting a “beeda” stops the conversation and the topic is changed.
My father in law had heart bypass a few years ago. The mother in law took control of his diet and started making him eat more salads and veggies. One day, he was a little cranky and asked how much longer he was going to have to eat this, “fucking rabbit food.” We have abbreviated it FRF. FRF stands for veggies.
In my family, if you screw up a joke telling, we say, “You left the chicken out.” This from an occassion when my mom told a joke about a farmer with a chicken and completely left out any mention of the chicken.
“Pigs with running lights” means a really weird dream. This is due, again, to my mom in whose dream there were indeed pigs with running lights along their sides (like the kind on the side of a semi-trailer).
“Wall in a bucket,” also known as drywall compound. So called because when a wall is really out of true, you keep slathering on “wall in a bucket” until it’s straight.
“Herds of roaming pigs and giant loud whistles”: means everything is going against you in trying to complete a task. Obviously stolen from My Cousin Vinny.
Probably a ton more, but I can’t think of any at the mo.
Oh! My mom’s house has a tiny storage closet upstairs that we always called the “BHC” – Black Hole of Calcutta.
This is a common-enough phrase but we chuckle about “a poor man’s ______” because once I described some actor as “a poor man’s Bill Pullman”. Apparently Bill Pullman was already a poor man’s someone else. :smack:
Getting lost is always “taking the scenic route.” Even if you’re lost in the worst, most ominous Clark Griswold-in-East St. Louis neighborhood.
“You’re late!”
“We took the scenic route.”
Whenever we go to bed, we’re migrating (from one room to another.)
My husband started this. First it was ‘‘let’s migrate’’ and now he just makes a ‘‘BaCAW! BaCAW!’’ sound to indicate he’s tired and ready to go to bed.
As my parents’ hearing got progressively worse, the number of fights they had based on what they thought the other person had said increased dramatically. My wife and I still use “Alone! I don’t want to spend Christmas alone!” to indicate a misunderstanding that’s getting out of hand.
My dad loves to abbreviate everything, so we have several- our favorite Mexican restaurant is called Puerto Vallarta, known in our family as The PV, and if you go there, you’re “PVing it.” Also, anytime someone asks for clarification on what an abbreviation means, my dad or mom will answer it and tack on, “Dumbass!” As in, “What does HBD stand for?” “Happy Birthday, dumbass!” It’s actually pretty endearing in real life.
mrAru and I read SF a lot … and we both have read the fuzzy sapiens books … we will actually use zarathustran fuzzy pidgin like ‘green shirt hagga’ for marine or army, ‘hokso fusso’ for good food, random yeeks for the heck of it.
When added to my occasional aphasia where I tend to substitute the word in some other language[if I cant think of the word for something, and I know it in a different language, I will have to use the alternate language as I literally can not get the english word out at all] so we can have conversations that sound like a wierd form of twin/personal language.
My mother speaks of relatives by their house number. She doesn’t visit Joe and Mary, she “Goes to 38.” Even her own house is referred to by number quite often. Confuses people.
“Going belgium” or “Gone all belgium” is our household equivalent of “fubar”. It derives from a Get Fuzzy strip, probably influenced by Hitchhikers. I’ve occasionally used it in the presence of Belgians, to their vague annoyance and/or amusement.
We also have the phrase “commit a tidy” whereby someone cleans up something actively being used by someone else especially if it is done surreptitiously or things are put away never to be seem. Like when I was doing research for a paper had all the books arrayed on a library table just so opened to the page I was going to use and what I was going to use it for, and when I came back from a brief bio-break, my husband had stacked them all according to size. Hours worth of work gone. He has also taken my silverware in mid snack. I put my fork down to take a drink of water and somehow he removed the fork, and knife without being obvious about it.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I’ll go downstairs to the couch, in case the different location will help. So I’ll whisper into Mr. S’s ear as I climb out of bed, “Can’t sleep. Gonna try a change of venue.”
“Elephant” was a name growing up for my dad’s omlets. He would use left overs in them and when we would ask what was in it…elephant. So we came to ask for it by name.
Constipated to mean “I am completely serious” with a group of my friends. I guess I had a way of saying just about anything with a straight face when telling them stuff. Then I would often have to assure them I was just kidding. We decided to differentiate by inserting “constipated” as a non sequiter as an idicator we were serious. Later “laxative” came to mean being all cutesy and PDAish and romantic (known to other friends as shmoopy-shmoopy-shmoopy [which I think is Seinfeld]). This is because the other two friends had a dating relationship and then told me “We broke up the other night…constipated”. I then questioned why they were being all laxative tonight then.
To my annoyance, my wife uses the term “the other” to refer to any other choice. If there were only a single other choice I would be ok with it, but there usually isn’t. “Do you want chicken for dinner, or the other?”
“Grant Show Batteries” To man-up, be what you aspire to be, take courage, etc. When getting up the nerve to ask a girl out a long time ago (I was very introverted) my friend told me not to do what I would normally do, do what Grant Show would do. Sort of a WWGSD type of thing. Then evolved into “Just put in your Grant Show batteries and do it!” With the same friend we also got “knocking down sandcastles”. This is when instead of striving to be better (building a better sandcastle) you instead strive to tear the other person down to make youself better by comparison. Oh, and “French Fry Geometry” is when you use whatever is at hand to better demonstrate things like Plane Geometry. “So the other driver was coming up on my right…lemme use some French Fry Geometry here…say this stapler is me and this pack of gum is the other guy…”
That’s so cute.
:eek: That just confirms my long-held suspicion that only sadness and despair can come from cleaning.
He is. He really is.
We buy colonal burgers from the place with the red flag - KFC. I’d never taken my kid there, but she went with some friends and came back raving about this great chicken burger - the colonal burger, at the place with the red flag.
Holdshe Hill is a very steep hill where my same kid with her new rollerblades decided to skate down to the security barrier which she was planning to grab hold of. The security guard thinking he was being helpful raised the barrier and she was soon zooming down the hill with her father racing behind her screaming “Hold she, hold she” (a local phrase). It was a near death experience for a six year old, she managed to make a sharp turn and stop. We laugh about it now, but she doesn’t - we can’t say Holdshe Hill within her earshot.
Any unanswerable question meets with the response “Yeah, well how old is Chaton?” We’ve never been able to determine the exact age of our family cat. To outsiders it’s more confusing since it sounds exactly like “How old is Shat On?” It’s then required for someone to say “my foot”