Is there a word that means “words or phrases that rename familiar objects, and that is a usage unique to a particular family”?
For example a colleague tells a story of how grandma used to make muffins for the kids and always called them cloudbuns because back in the olden days her little brother called them that. This is not a regionalism or colloquialism, just something unique to that particular family. And everyone in the family always calls muffins cloudbuns whenever talking to another family member, although fully aware it’s a family thing only.
Another family I know calls a baby bottle a “myba” because a toddler in the family would hold up her hands and say “My ba?” whenever a bottle appeared. They wouldn’t expect anyone outside the family to know what “myba” means but at the same time never say bottle when talking to each other, only ever myba.
Not always driven by kids though… other examples I’m familiar with include calling RVs ‘whales’ or kitchen tongs ‘whompers’ or calling beer ‘pip’.
Anyway if you get my direction…is there a name for this kind of renaming phenomenon?
Would it help if I tell you what we called those in my family?
To add a couple, to my nieces and nephew, my mom is “Gigga”, from the oldest’s baby-talk attempt at “Grandma”. And I don’t think there’s any standard word for this, but we also use the term “turkey cousins” for the cousins of one’s cousins on the other side, to whom one isn’t directly related.
Author Paul Dickson published an entire book devoted to in-family words and phrases, and he wasn’t the first to do so. He calls them Family Words (the title of his 1988 book, which has since been reprinted several times):
Various online dictionaries list “ecolect” as a word meaning “a language variety unique to a household”. The word seems to have been coined by analogy with “idiolect”–“The linguistic system of one person, differing in some details from that of all other speakers of the same dialect or language.” (Oxford English Dictionary)–which is a considerably older and better-attested word.
