Just for fun, are there any words you have made up? Or any words you use that are real words, but you use them intentionally wrong?
For me, I use the real word “flibbertigibbet”. I use it as a substitute for “F***”. Screw up on something, or something goes wrong at work - “FLIBBERTIGIBBET!”
I use “coagulate” for “get together”. As in, “Okay, Rachel and I will go to Fantasyland, Jack and Bob will go ride Indy, and we’ll coagulate at Pizza Port at 4:00.”
The Simpsons have completely mangled my vocabulary. Inspired by Homerisms like saxomophone, or household adds “MA” to almost any random 3-syllable word, like “telemavision”. Like you would say, made up words are perfectly cromulent around here.
I use bits and pieces from various partial conlangs I’ve encountered over the years, sometimes in place of profanity and sometime just to express something succinctly.
For example, I’m fond of “noy j’taht”, a bit of fictional profanity from the long-ago cartoon Pirates of Dark Water. The sound of it just conveys exasperation so well, without actually being offensive. I use “get’ke” from Lackey’s Shin’a’in language to express sentiments that encompass “please elaborate”, “explain yourself”, and “WTF?” In text media like chat, I often use a single question mark for the same purpose. (Oddly enough, people respond to “get’ke” pretty often; I guess the tone gets the meaning across.)
I used to use razzenfratz as my go-to cuss word when I was young and disinclined to utter profanity.
Similarly, my spousal unit and I will call someone a cheese log rather than say asshole or worse when confronted with said person’s idiotic behavior. It’s also been applied to the dog on occasion. It’s a curiously satisfying expression!
Of course my mother and I say “misled” with a “long i” sound, like miser has. We both mispronounced the word in our heads for years until we were corrected. I know others have mentioned it here too.
Not sure why/how, but for eons I’ve used “egg-salad” to mean “excellent”.
I also use “ironic” intentionally incorrectly (ironically?). The other night I asked a friend if he was wearing the shirt he had on ironically. He looked down at his shirt, then looked at me, all puzzled. “Why?”, he asked, and I pointed out that it was wrinkled and needed to be ironed. We then went back and forth a bit before he realized I was just fucking around.
My dad had that problem too. He was an educated man, and laughed about it after the fact, but he always read “misled” that way - and didn’t, for a long time, connect it with the idea of “mis - leading;” he said he just thought that “misling” was something bad that people did to somebody.
As for me, I long thought that I was the clever one who invented “coolth” as the opposite of “warmth.” Imagine the crushing disappointment when I finally Googled it and discovered that it has citations going back to the 1500s!