Do you have any family words?
You know the kind of thing I mean: a child cutely mispronounces a word or confuses a word with a similar one, and the rest of the family fondly picks up the funny new word and institutionalises it.
My late father delighted in converting our childish mistakes to settled usage by using the new coinage at every opportunity. This he did with my baby-ish mispronunciation of the word ‘horrible’ as ‘horbly’. The whole family took it on. Having inherited my father’s penchant for playfulness with words I took the concept further and applied the same conversion to ‘terrible’, as in ‘terbly’.
A younger cousin, as a little girl, used to present herself ready for bed clad in her ‘detting-down’. Her parents – my aunt and uncle – and my parents took it up and used it instead of ‘dressing gown’ for the rest of their lives. It didn’t catch on amongst the younger generation of siblings and cousins – we were way too cool as pre-teens for that kind of babytalk. Except…well, I would never say it publicly for fear of being scorned, but when I don that fluffy robe in the mornings and evenings my inner voice notes that I’m putting on my detting-down. Please don’t laugh.
So deeply is this tendency ingrained in me that I’ve nicked several such words from other families. A former boss once told me, decades ago, that his daughter when little mispronounced ‘bougainvillea’ as ‘vogan vinegar’. It was love at first hearing and to this day whenever I see that thorny bush with its brightly coloured flowers I say to myself: ‘Ah, the vogan vinegar!’ Sometimes I say it aloud.
A friend’s daughter likewise had early difficulty with ‘supermarket’ and it came out ‘sukermarker’. I see that friend often and we both still use it, almost unthinkingly.
A good friend years ago worked with a non-native English speaker who for some reason found it easier to cut the A off Adelaide and pronounce it Delaide. It is now our private in-joke, and whenever we go there, which we do often because we’ve got mates there, we go to Delaide.
I wondered if there was a word for these coinages. There’s a technical term – metathesis – for the shuffling round of letters to make them easier for the speaker, usually a child. ‘Hostipal’ and ‘pasketti’ instead of ‘hospital’ and ‘spaghetti’ are classic examples. ‘Arks’ for ‘ask’ persists into adulthood for some people. But this isn’t quite what I’m getting at. We need something less technical, more light-hearted.
Sometimes it’s playful invention, not mistake, that gives rise to these pleasing whimsies. One year when my it was my turn to put on Christmas dinner my sister, anxiously hovering in the kitchen while I fussed over getting my culinary masterpieces onto the table for the ravenous rellies, suggested that she’d be able to speed things along greatly if I would just hand over Dan Dan the Dirty Man.
Do you know what such a thing is? Didn’t think so. Dan Dan is that humble kitchen utensil with a handle and a flat rectangular business end with holes in it, and with which you lift cooked food out of pans or pots. We never called it an ‘egg-lifter’. Is that even the right word? I wouldn’t know because at least as far back as my maternal great-grandmother, all that side of the family – the detting-down crowd – still call it Dan Dan the Dirty Man. At least, us oldies do.
I used to think the ‘sunbeam’ was one of ours – that piece of crockery or cutlery that gets put out on the table but doesn’t get used so can be put back in the cupboard without having to be washed. It never used to be in dictionaries but the all-knowing new online ones tell me it’s been documented in families from Victoria (that’s me) and Queensland, now diminishing in use among younger Aussies. What a pity.
Okay, here’s one. I bet you haven’t heard of ‘cockansytes’. This one came into the family by way of my Yorkshire-born maternal grandfather. I enquired of the AI dictionary whether it knew about cockansytes. It did not. Hah! For your information, a cockansyte is an apricot.
This was published in the New Norfolk News and Derwent Valley Gazette on 23.4.26
And in similar vein is this piece, published on 27.8.21
Of tent births, glazier paternity and goose bridal wigwams.
When I was at ABC Radio one of the most popular talkback subjects was the daggy things your parents said to you when you were a kid. For instance, you, (the kid) walk into a room, or out of it, leaving a formerly closed door open. Parent says, with heavy sarcasm: ‘were you born in a TENT?!?’
The logic of it doesn’t hold up in that a) the parent knows damn well where you were born and it probably wasn’t a tent and b) even if you were born in a tent chances are your family lived in a house with doors which you learnt how to open and close from an early age.
But the point was of course to remind the kids that heating and cooling cost MONEY, which DOESN’T GROW ON TREES and furthermore WE AREN’T MADE OF IT!
Dads were the worst offenders with this kind of thing. ‘Was your father a glazier?’ was my dad’s zinger if one of us kids stood in front of the television. Again, the idea that a professional glass-maker would sire a transparent child offends biological science but we soon got the point.
An ABC colleague remembered his dad saying ‘We know you’re a PAIN (pane – geddit?) but we can’t see through you!’ That’s at least a working pun and it beats my dad’s witticism hands down.
We had lots of fun inviting listeners to call in with similar stories, and it’s amazing how widespread these sayings were, at least among the parents of my baby-boomer generation. There was a flavour of economic hardship about them, often inherited from parents who lived through the Depression and the war.
Take that perennial child-to-parent query ‘what’s for tea?’ Mothers were most often on the receiving end of this one in the Olden Days when they did all the cooking. They had a repertoire of daggy responses to cope with such pestiferous questioning. ‘A glass of water and a look round’ was the response I often got. Another one was ‘bread and duck under the table.’
Then when my siblings and I grizzled about what was served up we were reminded there were starving children in Africa who would be grateful for such a feast. To which the shameless reply was ‘well they’re welcome to it!’
I was a fussy eater, and my dad would say ‘Eat that up – it’ll put hairs on your chest.’ ‘But Daddy’, I would say, ‘girls aren’t supposed to have hairs on their chests, are they?’ Because you could never be sure, especially if you were not only young but gullible, as I was. Dad would just smile enigmatically.
As I grew older and wised up to the parental leg-pull, I would sometimes be told ‘there’s no flies on you’, sometimes followed by ‘but you can see where they’ve been’. I found it puzzling at first but gradually twigged that it was a compliment.
Remember when we pointed at the visitor and asked ‘Mum, who’s SHE?’ and were told ‘SHE’s the cat’s mother’, said with a certain stiffness of tone. It was a lesson in the need to address any person present by name, not by impolite pronoun.
Then there were the times your dad was busy in the shed, and you wandered in and pestered him by pointing to anything and everything and asking ‘what’s that, Dad?’ and he would give you one of the many variants of ‘a wigwam for a goose’s bridle’.
If my dad was busy and I asked ‘Dad, where’s Mum?’ he would reply ‘she went mad and they shot her’. I’m proud to say I never fell for that one.
I’d love to know if these have been passed down to succeeding generations. Do millennials get asked if they were born in a tent? Were Gen Y told that she’s the cat’s mother? I expect kids don’t get scolded for standing in front of the TV anymore, except maybe at their grandparents’ place where you might actually find two people watching the same screen. Otherwise the kids are likely to be in their own rooms, left to their own devices, literally.
And how do modern parents manage food fussiness? I expect that in response to the old Starving Children routine they’d get an eye-roll followed by a lecture on global warming and how it’s all their fault for not being vegan, so they probably keep their mouths shut.