My daughter (nearly 6 years old) has no less than 3 identical white cats (plush animals) purchased at the same place at various times (due to the original becoming not-so-white). They all look identical to me but she can tell them apart at a glance.
“No, not that one daddy! That’s the mommy cat. I want the kitten.” (She’s very consistent with which one is the mother cat too.) We all begin the search for yet another white(ish) cat that is somewhere in the house.
And more on topic… “No-K” is the opposite of “OK”.
Once, when my kid was very little and we were out running errands, he spied a familiar looking restaurant. I heard a pathetic little query from the back seat: “Dinner store?” We stopped for a snack. And then we called restaurants dinner stores for the next several years.
Just thought of a good one, but an adult came up with it. Still, it’s in the family lexicon, so I’ll share:
When my wife was a teenager, she was on a car trip with her dad and stepmom. Stepmom looks out the car window and sees a field full of horses, including quite a few young/newborns. But, none of the words are coming to her. Foals, colts, fillies? She blanks. So instead, she alerts the car by excitedly shouting, “Look! Um…um…puppy horses!”
This doesn’t strictly fit the OP, as it’s a misunderstanding that stuck, not something the kid invented:
At a backyard party when someone was grilling hot dogs, one of a group of kids watching observed: “those are burned!” to which the cook replied, “no, they’re just crispy,” meaning browned. The group of kids misheard this as “frisby” and for a long time after my boy and friends always wanted “frisby hotdogs” so I’d crisp them a bit to make them “frisby”.
Not the name of a thing, but the name of a person.
When we were growing up, we had three grandmothers. One was our great grandmother. It was a little confusing what to call them. My brother asked GGma what she wanted to be called. Grandma, great grandma, grandma Sundblom? She answered “Just grandma.”
From then on that was her name. Just Grandma. For the longest time I thought we called her that because she lived alone. As in, who lives in that house?
When my daughter was 2 ish she called the Pegasus horses in Fantasia as “neigh-birds”. She called animals by their sounds so the horses were “neighs” and since they were winged, they were a type of bird.
My cousin, when he was little, called Night Time “Dark Time”
There’s an entire book of such words (albeit mixed in with others that aren’t little-kid coinages), Dickson’s Family Words:
He was making gingerbread men (women?) and using those teeny tiny M&Ms. As he added each M&M to each cookie’s chest in the anatomically correct spot he soflty said to himself: “nibbles”.
My daughter’s friend coined the term “front-following” to refer to when a car in front of you keeps going the exact same way you are.
Not a coined word, but a new usage: When I put my daughter to sleep, I used to tell stories to her and then sing songs. Usually the stories were read out of books but occasionally I made them up. One time I asked her if she wanted me to read a story and she said “No, sing one”, meaning “tell a story without reading it from a book”.
Not so much a puzzle; you just have to use imaginarynumbers.
1i, 2i, 3i, 4i, 5i, 6i, 7i, 8i, 9i, 10i.
My parents raised us bilingually, with my mom speaking only to us kids in French and my dad speaking only English. When she was young, my sister didn’t know the words for the languages, so she called them mommy-language or daddy-language. She would ask new people she was meeting whether she had to speak in mommy or dad language?
I’ve been calling leftover pizza crusts “pizza bones” for at least 20 years now, and I learned the term from some friends who said they grew up calling them that. You sure your kid didn’t hear it at school/a friend’s house/TV?
