My mother has a habit of making up new names for things that the family often uses in conversation later:
Roosevelts: frozen grapes Brown Betty: a brown wooden stirring and serving spoon Flanana: a large, showy flag (often seen near government buildings) Doodlehoppins: a generic term of endearment for the current pet – Mitzi, our current dog, is frequently called “Mitzi Ditzy Doodlehoppins” Fluffy muffins: towels, after being tumbled to warmth in the dryer
There are others, but they’ve temporarily slipped my mind.
Most of ours are related to cats. We’re a very cat-centric family. Thus:
deeden - a kitten, or more broadly any cat. When my youngest brother-in-law was a baby, this was his word for kitten, and it stuck around long after his pronunciation improved. Plural is deedens.
deets - a cat. Related to deeden but used as a suffix to a given cat’s name: “CJ-deets,” “Merlin-deets,” and so on.
croola - when cats knead with their paws. Spelling on this is hotly disputed, but it’s pronounced with a long “ooo” and a short “ah,” like “cruel-ah.” Some of our family members maintain this originated from a Dutch word for a kind of nubby fabric, but they don’t have a cite, and neither do I.
On a bit of a tangent, any cat sharpening its claws in a non-destructive manner is “sharpening its paws;” we adopted a declawed cat and he persisted in using the scratching post, so we applied it to any situation where the scratching was cute rather than an occasion requiring the use of the squirt bottle. Destructive scratching is “doing its claws,” usually followed by “on the couch / carpet / back of the chair,” and squirting ensues.
Non-feline terms are wubby (a baby blanket) and deedee (a pacifier).
Shmickle: Whatever you need it to be. As in, “Honey, will you get the shmickle out of the refrigerator?” or (to the cat or dog) “You little shmickle.” It’s a multi-purpose word, part of this bizarre language my husband made up.
Poo-poo paper: Toilet paper.
Turn-iquet (tourniquet): Your turn, when playing Yahtzee with my sister and I.
Full blouse: Full house, when playing Yahtzee with my sister and I.
shmall - adjective indicating extreme cuteness, usually but not restricted to items of a small stature. In our home, primarily “shmall kitties”.
pud - loveable socially clueless dork, especially my brother-in-law. My sister-in-law apparently made this up when they were kids. Usage: “You’re such a pud.” It’s not short for pudding, either, it rhymes with bud.
My father bought a TV with a remote control in the early 70s, when the technology was budding, to say the least. The remote itself was a brown brick with a bunch of analog buttons on top. The TV had a real dial on it - remember those things? Anyway, when you click the button on the remote to change the channel, the dial physically moved, making this “conk conk conk” noise as it did so. From that point forward, the TV remote in my family was always the “conker.”
My husband was truly assimilated into the family when he started to refer to the garage door opener as the “garage conker.” Even I hadn’t thought of that one, but it stuck, and now we have the TV conker and the garage conker.
We’re either long-lost cousins, or this word really exists in some form, maybe in a different language. I and my family use it, with the same meaning (messed-up, out of order), but I always mentally spelled it “kershimmeled”. (I’ve never seen it written.
To my friend’s 3-year-old son, any cat is a “dow” (pronounced “doe,” like the female deer). This is because their cats are Coty and Shadow, and the only part of either of their names he could say when he first started talking was “dow.”
I don’t remember my family having any weird name for mac & cheese, but we did have “Mommy’s Surprise:” cheese and beef inside a Bisquick shell. Yuuuummm.
If you’re around my mother or brother and me, “Idi Amin” is the standard response to any “who” question that you don’t know the answer to. It started with the original version of Trivial Pursuit: “Idi Amin” was the answer to at least one of the questions, and quickly became a funny answer to most other questions (“Who did the Beach Boys write the song ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ about?” “Idi Amin.”). We still use “Idi Amin” when playing Trivial Pursuit today – even the 90s edition – and he has spilled over into everyday life.
“Hey, do you remember who won the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar this year?”
“Idi Amin.”
Whoa. I actually debated on how to spell it, because its sort of a cross between Cruh- and Ker- Hmmm…my dad is from Longmont Colorado, and his family has been there for several generations. Any chance one of your parents is an Oakie from Colorader?
Macaweenie-n-cheese, where you put sliced up hotdogs in it.
Shnivels, the detritus left over after you cut a things out of paper, also known as “scrappy-bits”.
"Jeezus Tits!", an exclamation of surprise or astonishment, but not anger.
Spap Oop, used to describe substances you can’t remember the name for, as in “When you go to the garage, bring me back that can of spap oop that cleans carpets.”
Klupperei, from my German granpa’s vocab. He used it to mean too-much-noise. We also use it to mean too-much-junk, like “Get all this klupperei off the table so we can eat!”
disastrophy: a horribly disastrous catastrophe. Made up by our daughter.
FOG: Fear of God, as in to put the FOG on an appliance or computer to make it
work correctly again, because it knows we’ll take it apart if it doesn’t shape
up. I made that one up.
FED: The Feline Entertainment Device, AKA a bird feeder that feeds the squirrels
more than it feeds the birds. Our cats get excited when we fill it up, and sit in
the window waiting for the squirrel-and-bird show to start. Made up by Kiminy and daughter.
The Bruce tree: The spruce tree out back, so named by daughter when she
mis-heard me refer to it. She got mad at me for laughing so hard.
Bruce was also the name of our rector at church at the time.
“It’s just around the corner”: Phrase made up by Kiminy and myself while
living in France. Just about any given intersection
had at least three roads entering, with many corners
to turn, and you often had to walk down several
short streets to go any reasonable distance. This
made giving directions difficult, thus the phrase
which meant “It’s not very far, but I can’t tell you
how to get there.”
“Gleis Vier!”: Another one from France. We lived in Strasbourg, and on occasion
took the train to Baden-Baden for a hike and a dip in the hot mineral
bath. On our perhaps fourth and last trip the conductor in Kehl (just
on the other side of the Rhine from Strasbourg), realizing we were
not German, kept telling us which platform the B-B train was arriving
at, even after several Danke Shoens and Vielmol Dankes.
“Vegetables”: Bits of pine trees or other flora that find their way into dinner being
cooked over a fire while camping.
The Davidson Gerbil: The Davidson (NC) college Journal, the alumni magazine
we get, so named by me very early on.
Growing up:
candychocolatecup: Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate bits in a waxed paper Dixie
cup. We always fought over who got the blue-lined cup. This
was the preferred dessert when we were little.
We also have a phrase, “Want some cherries?” It indicates that somebody is being repeatedly offered something they don’t want/need, although the offerrers are trying to be kind. It originated when our daughter took a boyfriend to visit her grandmother, who kept offering them some fresh bing cherries. They had to say “no, thank you,” about a million times. Then they came to our house, where my husband promptly made the same offer a couple times. After they left, the bf asked our daughter, “What is it with your family and cherries?” See also: “Do you need a sweater?”
My father was fond of making up swear words, usually involving “fart”. His more common words were fartblossom and dinglefart. He also used dingleberry a lot but I did not find out he didn’t make this up until I was much older and heard it used by other people.
My personal made up word is “floofy” I use it a lot to describe how certain medications make me feel like I have a head full of fluff and I’m all goofy.
When I’m going to the grocery store, I always say, “I’m going to the T-O-E.”
This comes from when I was about 3 years old…my parents would leave me
& my sisters with my MeMa or a sitter—when they were leaving, they would
spell out the word S-T-O-R-E. According to my family, it took me no time at all
to realize that my parents were going to a “store”. So I started saying, "I want
to go to the “T-O-E”…picking up only those letters out of the word S-T-O-R-E.
Now I say T-O-E and my 26 year old daughter does the same thing.
There’s also “Dee-Dah”…this is the code for rocking a baby to sleep.
When my mom used to rock my youngest sister to sleep, she’d kind of sing
“Deeee-dah, deee-dah”…the deee came on the rock forward, the dah on the
rock back. So my sister would say “I wanta dee-dah” when she wanted to be
held & rocked. My sisters & I have carried that on & my daughter and my
nieces do “Dee-Dah” with their own children.
And I just have to say this is a really neat thread…
I just “dee-dah’d” with my grandson this weekend and I didn’t
really think about it being a “tradition” until just now.
How cool…
My family is an avid user of my favorite term, one that I coined when I was about 5 or 6. A shot of whipped cream straight from the can is called a “dive” and people look at me funny when I refer to it as such in their houses.
