My husband’s family had about a dozen words for the remote control, the only couple I remember are the “Wopper” (Whopper?) and “Perkolator”. Once we got a TiVo it of course became the “Tooka tooka”.
To my nieces and nephews, my mother is “Gigga”. When the oldest was a baby (in the Mama-Dada stage of talking), it was the closest she could come to “Grandma”. My sister liked it, because it resolved the age-old grandmother nomenclature problem (which grandmother is called what), and so it persisted.
Meanwhile, in our extended family, one’s cousins’ cousins on the other side (i.e., you’re not actually related to them by blood) are “turkey cousins”. This is mostly because we think the batch of such cousins that we have the most contact with are a bunch of turkeys, but I’ve had people tell me that the term makes sense (though why they’d think that, not knowing the turkeys, I’m not sure).
Yes, you are right. I misspoke.
From the world wide words website:
"The most common story ties it to the Pepsodent-sponsored Bob Hope radio show on NBC, which started in 1938. There was a running gag on the show, a catchphrase of supporting player Jerry Colonna, who would regularly ask: “Who’s Yehudi?”. This became extremely popular and provoked a song in 1941. (These were simpler days.)
The earliest example in print of Yehudi, in a sense of something that isn’t there, is from the Science News Letter of September 1940: “The machine has not received a nickname as yet. Since it deals with imaginary numbers, it may answer to the name of ‘Yehudi’.” In 1942, a film entitled Crazy Cruise featured an invisible battleship, the SS Yehudi. The following year, one of the very earliest US military stealth projects was called Project Yehudi.
I haven’t been able to find any earlier references, so the word really may have its origin in Jerry Colonna’s catchphrase. If it does, then there may well be a connection with Yehudi Menuhin. The story claims that Menuhin was engaged to play on one of the early shows, but that Jerry Colonna didn’t know who he was, and went around asking the cast. This is supposed to have led to the running gag of his trying to identify Yehudi.
Part of the popularity of Yehudi as a term for an invisible entity may lie in a linkage in people’s minds with a rhyme by Hughes Mearns that was set to music as The Little Man Who Wasn’t There in 1939 — just when the Colonna catchphrase was becoming known."