Secret family words
Lots of families have private words and expressions, going back generations. Ysenda Maxtone Graham picks her favourites
Alongside the official vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary, there exists a hidden parallel vocabulary. It consists of the invented words and phrases that live entirely within families.
Over this long summer of 2020, when we’ve been ensconced within our family bubbles, these expressions have had a chance to take deeper root than ever.
Foreign-exchange children or au pairs travelling to Britain this autumn will be bemused by mother calling to daughter, ‘Put your glubs on or I’ll spifflicate you,’ or ‘I need a borgie. I’m throstled.’
Those four family words come from four separate sources: Lucy Mangan, Edward Bradford, Julie Welch and Libby Purves. Family words stay within families and pass down through generations, but not over the garden wall. They have a remarkably bonding effect.
As photograph albums become a vanished hobby, family words – ‘Daft words and phrases evoking entire stories from family folklore’, as Lucy Mangan describes them – are taking their place as seals of a family’s character and past.
Hearing about how they came into being can feel like listening to someone’s dream: ‘My father was in a café in the early 1970s…’; ‘We were on a boat in Cornwall years ago and my mother suddenly said, à propos nothing…’; ‘We were in a restaurant and misheard the waiter…’; ‘My husband used to collect old newspaper cuttings and one of the headlines was…’
From such obscure moments in families’ histories came the words ‘emulsion’ (a word on the tip of your tongue), ‘cricket socks’ (a changed subject) and ‘ministrett (minute’s rest), and the expression ‘Anyone want Bulganin?’ (Did anyone phone for me while I was out?).
I asked 15 people to tell me some of their family words and to explain how they came about. It was generous of them
– it can be embarrassing and exposing to explain some of these weird terms that came into existence in obscure ways decades ago, some of them scatological.
A few said, ‘No, we don’t have any family words. Sorry.’ It must be dull, I thought, to live a life entirely within the rules of Scrabble. Other families seem to speak almost entirely in private family words, even more so if they have a dog for whom they and their forebears have invented a special dog language.
A major source of family words is children’s mispronunciations, so enchantingly wrong that they seem better than the real words and stay for ever, a perpetual link with lost childhood innocence. Children are natural spoonerists.
So, in the writer Libby Purves’s family, a cement mixer is always a ‘mix menter’. In my family, we leave our car in a ‘par cark’. The Speaight family eat ‘psghetti’ and the Miers family admire ‘puzzy munkle trees’.
As a child, I named the scarf folded into a triangle and tied under the chin that my mother (along with the Queen, and most of the female population) wore in the 1960s a ‘buggan’. It is and always will be a buggan.
Children give names to things for which there is a gap in the dictionary. Adèle Geras’s daughter said, as a young child, ‘But Mummy, what’s the ness in the book?’ – ‘ness’ as at the end of ‘hopefulness’. She meant, ‘What’s the main plot point, the twist?’
A good word, and it stayed for ever – as, with my in-laws, did ‘pépé bit’ to describe the part of the body between the upper lip and the nose, and ‘phalanthropy’ to describe someone with a jutting-out chin.
As young children speak unashamedly about bodily fluids and wind, many family words are excrement-related. In our family, the name coined by one of our toddler sons for the pee you do first thing in the morning, that comes out a darkerthan-usual yellow, is a ‘swain pee’. For the Mierses, a fart is a ‘wacksie’; for the Welches, a poo is a ‘bobby’ (‘from when my husband was a baby’).
As meals form the hub of family life, there are lots of meal-related family words, including long-standing mispronunciations such as ‘bald egg’ and ‘tim peaches’. Do any other families, or is it just my Scottish one, use the word ‘eech-feech’ (the ‘ch’ sound as in ‘loch’) to mean ‘the detritus at the end of a picnic’?
The Bradfords have a good term (‘the blessings’) to describe ‘any cutlery, crockery and glasses that remain unused on the table at the end of the meal and (oh joy!) don’t need to be washed up’.
I like that, and am very taken with two words invented by Adèle Geras’s late husband, Norman: ‘gishbo’, meaning ‘jumble-sale fodder’ or ‘what you go and buy at 3pm on Christmas Eve to add to the Christmas presents’; and ‘schlucket’ for ‘thingummy-jig’.
Tempting though it might be, to adopt other people’s family words would be rank theft. Back they go behind the closed doors where they belong, as eccentric as families themselves are when no one is looking.