There’s a perfectly wonderful word from my family – “niff-naw.” (My sister and I have several times debated the spelling of it, with no conclusion ever reached.)
It’s a verb, and it means to indulge in the kind of petty picking at each other that is a step before an actual argument – when two people are tired and irritated, they might start to niff-naw at each other. Very hard to define, but extremely useful – except at this point, there’s only a half dozen people on the planet (my sister and her husband, my brother, and myself – I don’t know if he’s spread it to his family, I’ll have to ask) who know the word.
I was reminded of it the other day, when I got into a thing with my boss at work that can only be described as “niff-nawing.”
Any words from your family (or friends) that deserve a wider usage?
Two off the top of my head are gnasky (from the made up Swedish adjective gnaskig meaning peckish. Not so much hungry as just wanting something tasty for the sake of it.
If you are feeling böp, pronounced buuhp, means you are feeling small and a little depressed and need to be spoiled.
Boob: verb
To comfort or soothe in a maternal way.
“Bobby didn’t ask me to the dance, but Mom boobed me and I felt better.”
I was nearly thirty before I realized most people don’t use boob as a verb. In our family we’ve always boobed each other. There’s just something about laying your head on a matronly bosom until you feel better, eh? Kid falls down, approaches nearest female for clucking and soothing, kid nestles head on boobs while being clucked over sympathetically, ouchie soothed.
Severious. Came about through an accidental slip. That’s a severious flu going around. He was doing some severious drinking. I’ve got a severious cash flow problem.
To bish: to fix, to open, or to make work. My mom will periodically thrust something–a jar of pickles, a remote control–at me and command “Bish it!”
To white tornado: to do a quick clean-up, putting away clutter, but not necessarily dusting or vaccuuming. “Help me white tornado the living room.” I think this phrase originated with an ad campaign in my mom’s youth.
Noo-noo: an insult, literally means “bicycle seat sniffer.” My aunt made this one up as a kid. “Quit being such a noo-noo!”
A friend of mine told me this story which goes back many years. He and another guy, both single at the time, were debating whether to join a dating agency. He thought it would a be good for a laugh at least, whereas his friend thought it would be a waste of time for this reason: “It’s always the same. You get these photos and the women look really hot but then you meet up with one and she turns out to be just another gynosaurus.”
So there you go. Gynosaurus.
Just for the record: I admit I laughed when I heard this, but at the same time I thought it was very iffy, politically incorrect and potentially offensive to women. However, I’ve since told this story several times in mixed company or to female friends, just to test the feeling, and so far not one woman I know has taken offence and all have found it at least an amusing new word.
I was always fond of verbing - the act of turning a noun into a verb. My friends at school would talk of “thesising” (working on their thesis papers) and “hubbing” (going to the cafeteria in the student union building called The Hub), so I deemed this habit “verbing” and so it has been called that ever since.
I think it’s a terribly useful word (and practice) myself. Everyone should try it.
Uncle George, as in “Don’t be such an Uncle George.”
A relative who (as a child), upon being presented with some new food at dinner, announced, “I don’t like it and I wouldn’t like it even if I tried it!”
Funny that Boob has been coined as a maternal bosomy cuddle - in our family it was “Moob”!
Now living in a bilingual atmosphere, the number of family only words has of course jumped - the opportunity for making great words has increased twofold.
The one that has stuck the hardest is “Nananumi” for “goodnight” The Japanese for goodnight is “Oyasumi”. My husband always goes to bed way before me, and when I went to bed I’d say “Oyasumi” to him anyway, and he’d sort of mumble back in his sleep “N…N…N…Mi” I thought it was hilarious that he was SO conditioned to be polite that he’d even respond in his sleep!!!
“Nananumi” has now been shortened to “Numi Time” for nap time. You only have to say “Numi Time” to my three year old for his thumb to go in!
In terms of spelling made up words, my Mum and I had a hilarious conversation which reduced everyone round us to tears, but we still don’t know WHY we were right!
She came marching into our messy living room, strewn with Sunday papers and prone bodies, and declared “This place is a pig maunch!”
My dad looked up and mildly asked "How do you spell “Maunch”, anyway? Right off, Mum and I both said “M-A-U-N-C-H”.
Then Dad laughed and asked, “Why isn’t it spelled “M-O-R-N-C-H”?”
With a dead straight face Mum said, (screwing up her face and making a long snout mouth) "Because then it would be “MORRNCH”!
It’s a dohickey, a doodad, the thingamabobber… anything, really, when you can’t think of the right word.
It can be used as a verb, with french “Premier Groupe” conjugation, or an adjective, and so forth (kind of like “smurf”, for the Smurfs)
The strange thing is that my dad and I can literally follow each others’ thoughts so well that an entire mamachino discussion is perfectly clear to us. Especially when we used to work in the kitchen together. This bewilders my mother.
Sweak - So bad (weak) that it’s cool (sweet). Often used in reference to various bolidy fuctions, in my old group. What can I say - I was the only female.
Not so much a word, but a phrase. We yell “Lies Mr. Bear!” instead of saying that someone’s lying.
Whenever I wasn’t feeling well, my dad would say I had the “epizootick”.
We lived next door to the Holdaways when I was a kid. Their daughter Wendy had a horse. One day the horse got into a bag of its oats and ate them all, and was so full he just stood in the yard with his tongue hanging out. Now when we eat too much and are too full to move, we say "I feel like Wendy Holdaway's horse".