'Not my first rodeo', No 1: - Famiolects
When I came to start this blog about cancer and life, I was surprised to remember that I had written a blog back nearly 15 years ago when I still worked in Lexicography. I am shamelessly repurposing these posts here for those of a linguistic bent. Here's one on "Famiolects"
“Would you draw the bloomin curtains – you’ll be seen from Wallace’s Bog!”
I completely understand what this means, have heard it many times and have used it many times too. But the phrase ‘Wallace’s Bog’ has a special status for me, because I have never heard it or used it except to members of my direct family.
I would guess that you can easily think of a phrase that has the same status for you – something that you are very familiar with but which you only use within the family. I would say this is one of the words that make up my famiolect (TM?), that subset which is part of a language, part of a dialect but is actually an emblem of a family group and of the language that holds that group together.
Here are a few more words and phrases from my famiolect with my stab at a translation or explanation. I would love to hear yours:
- · Gowk: an apple core. Eg (when our mother had made an apple pie) “does anyone want the gowks” (one would gnaw on them in an absent-minded rather than desperate way, I hasten to add)
- · Plodging: what you did at the seaside when you rolled your trousers up and shuffled into the small breakers. Eg: “We spent the day plodging and stopping seagulls from nicking our sandwiches” (NB I know that in some parts of the country this was common parlance, but not in the part where we lived)
- · “I like to hear frogs..” a rude comment on someone else’s bombast or self-obsession. The missing second half which everyone understood was ‘..farting in the stubble’
- · Banaclat: we didn’t know that nobody else’s father in our street said this when he went off to work. Nor did we realise for many years that is was a remnant of the Gaelic that my father heard around him when he was a child.
So what words and phrases make up your famiolect? What things do you only use (with pleasure and gusto) when surrounded by your family? And do you know why those particular phrases? Was it migration? An ear for colourful language? An obsessive attachment to Gilbert and Sullivan? What built your famiolect?
I still use “if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas” (from your mum, and very useful for American politics), and “nowt” (from John, and which mystifies my friends), plus innumerable musical references (mainly John, but some I think from Mary and Cat).
ReplyDeleteMy maternal grandfather was a writer manque. Youngest of nine in a Montana farming family, he spent his young adulthood caring for his aging parents and raising the two sons of a sister who had been lobotomized following a breakdown when her husband left her. During the Depression he worked for the highway, then became a real estate agent selling mostly farms and development properties around the Flathead Valley. If he was in an expansive mood, after he had unwound not with a drink but with the crossword puzzle, he might tell you a story, like how he once shot a bear "up the exhaust." He would write letters to us grandkids that were full of the kinds of abbreviations that he used to keep the descriptions short in the newspaper ads for properties. Long before texting, he used single letters and numbers to substitute for words - U, R, 2, 4, B, and so on. He would frequently sign his notes "I luv U big much & so" - and my brothers and I still say "I love you big much and so" to each other and our children and niblings.
ReplyDeleteOops - forgot to sign the above. Didn't mean to post as anonymous!
DeleteMore from the familect... I was staggeringly old before I deduced that these words meant something different from what they were used for - as in, I knew that "you gannet" mean "you messy glutton", but I didn't know - living in western Canada mostly - that they were huge seabirds! Another expression from my Dad was that someone or some statement was "as ignorant as 'The Horse' Daily" which I believed was some sort of Irish newspaper... Turned out to be the nickname of a large Daily family member. Some were punchlines for longer anecdotes - "More bread or I'll be out", meaning added bribes must be offered for me to continue to stay away. Some are Geordie - 'scutter' and expressions like 'she was either all sugar or all shite'. And then expressions like "let the butcher cry" (meaning spend freely, ideally on credit, let others worry about getting paid) and one of my Dad's favourites, "Being of sound mind and body, we spent the lot".
ReplyDeleteLove em! And recognised most of em
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