I am so telling my sister about “committing a tidy.” This kind of thing happens in her household all the time!
When you derail a conversation because you mis-hear something, someone is bound to say, loudly, “YOU SAY THERE’S A BOBCAT IN THE STAIRWELL?!??” This comes from an incident when my sister was working the front desk at a hotel. The hotel had received a bomb threat, and the desk staff was trying to quietly notify other staff members. There was a janitor who was quite hard of hearing, and he heard “bomb threat” as “bob cat” and kept asking, loudly, about the bobcat in the stairwell.
A dark, threatening cloud is an omnibosity. This comes from the family malapropism of referring to dark clouds as looking “omnibus” rather than ominous.
When you receive a gift that is wrapped in such a way that there is no mistaking what the gift is (back in the day, record albums were a prime candidate for this), you pick up the gift and say, “I wonder what it i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-s?” – with “is” being spoken as a horse whinny. This has to do with a Christmas where my mother had “wrapped” an antique wheeled horse by draping it with a sheet, which didn’t disguise it very well.
When I was a kid and the family economy was in its leaner years we wound up eating rice-fried egg-French fries as a common dish. We started calling it “Exotic dish” and the names still goes on 35 years later.
Alligator = the passenger in a car. (from navigator) This brings up knowing your way around somewhere, which means you have alligation skills.
Mergansers are the cold breezes that sneak in between the sheets when your honey rolls over. This came from a really weird dream I had… I can’t even describe it, but it was vivid.
Grilled Cheese is Grilled Jesus.
Sometimes my folks would be desperate to find something for all 7 of us to do when we were growing up - and it had to be free or cheap. Didn’t mean us kids didn’t get all smart-ass about it, though. Free events are “culches” - and going through a museum or public garden used to get my whole family quietly chanting “culch… culch… culch…”
If somebody says something out loud that is supposed to be a secret - the term is “Gone with the Wind? Who said that?” made immortal by my grandmother during a charades game.
This is Grandma’s favourite saying (which we all say now too).
As a kid my Dad would take us on day trips all over the place, but he’d never tell us where we were going*. We could sometimes wrinkle it out based on what we brought with us (if it was a popular place to go eg we’re bringing swim suits and a picnic lunch? We were going to the hot springs…) but he wouldn’t tell us even as we pull up right in front of it. The answer to the question was always “We’re going to LA.” And he would usually clarify it with Leduc or Lethbridge Alberta (which now that I think of it is even MORE funny because I’ve never actually been to either!). My brother and I were watching The Whole Ten Yards and at one point the guys chasing them find out they are going to LA. I looked over at my brother and said simply “Yeah, Leduc Alberta” which had us cracking up for long enough we had to turn it off until we calmed down to watch the rest.
*He STILL does this. Last year he took me and my son to Disneyworld and refused to tell me where we were going beyond we would need passports until two weeks before we left. I guessed long before that (At least to Disney, I thought Land). It’s both fun and yet extremely irritating.
Any time someone’s being a smart-ass, all you have to say is “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know,” and my family falls about laughing.
It stems from Easter when I was 4 or 5. We were looking for little Mary Janes for my Easter shoes. I wanted white, and mom wanted me to have black. I’ve always been rather hard on light-colored clothes.
The saleswoman in the shoe store aske me what I wanted, and I said “White.” Unbeknownst to me, Mom was over my head frantically waving her arms and mouthing “Black! Black!”
The saleswoman comes back out and opens the box for inspection. I looked at the shoes, looked at her, put my hands on my hips and declared, “Those aren’t white, those are black. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know!”
Yeah, we didn’t go back to that shoe store for a loooooong time.
DH and I say “honoring the car” for filling up. It’s from the Family Guy episode where Hank gives Kahn a tank of propane as a “welcome” gift. Kanh responds, “You honor me by giving me gas.”
I get some funny looks sometimes from people who don’t know the reference! “What’d you do over lunch?”
This meant calling a truce in whatever argument we were having because we knew company was coming. We would be a lovey dovey couple for a few hours. We usually never got back to the argument.
In my family, we don’t take the scenic route, we go exploring. Or, if my mom somehow manages to get lost on the way home (it’s happened), we’re throwing off the terrorists (based on the idea that you should vary your driving route in case the terrorists want to kidnap and/or bomb you).
Pizza crusts are pizza bones.
Edith-style cooking is a reference to my maternal grandmother, who could burn or blacken anything, including macaroni and cheese.
There’s any number of movie and television quotes we use, especially Young Frankenstein (“put ze [object] bek!”) or any number of Hitchcock, musicals, or other classic cinema. And I am so stealing “committed a tidy”. My mom does that all the time.
We used to get takeout all the time from a greasy dive chinese takeout place that was called “Happy Wok”
For some reason, my dad just couldn’t manage to remember this name. Ever. After going there dozens of times. He’d struggle to come up with the name - “Wong Wok…Wrong Wok…Ching Wok…uh…Wickety Wok!”
Somehow he always landed on Wickety Wok. So my brother and I now refer to anything low-class, jankety, dive-y or cheap as being “Wickety”.
We often have a drink in some place called the Rab. If we’re half dressed up, the whole squad’s going smart casual. We’ll have a shitload of x and tell each other that it’s a lot for a fat bastard like you.
Yep, we mostly speak Emperor’s New Groove-ese, but there’s another we use that comes from the moment in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World when they realize where the treasure is buried. It expresses that something miraculous and wonderful has happened: “Double-you…”
My partner’s office is only a few blocks from my own. Once in awhile one of us will email the other: “Monkey couch?”
This is our term for: “Want to escape your office and meet me for a quick latte?” It came about because near the cafe where we used to meet, there was a seating area with a couple couches. One day there was a woman sitting on a couch with a stroller next to her and an a infant in her arms. Then she suddenly and quite casually tossed the baby aside like a wet rag, without even looking at it, onto the couch next to her, where it flopped in a crumpled. :eek: We were gobsmacked!
The real baby was actually in the stroller covered in blankets. The “infant” she tossed aside like a sack of potatoes was a toy monkey. I think we both nearly fainted from misreading the scene initially though. So the “monkey couch” referred to our meeting place. The couches have since been removed due to remodeling and we now go to an entirely different part of downtown to meet, but “monkey couch” still refers to “going for coffee”.
