Question of the day (18th December).

What weird word or phrase does your family say but nobody else would understand? How did it come to be?

My answer:

Gosh, we use tons of weird words or phrases in my family. I really love word play and so does my Mum, so we create a lot of inside slang and neologisms and stuff. Sofi or my Dad aren’t huge wordsmiths overall, but still like it to and with Sofi we have a lot of words that only we know what they mean, or rather, people do know what they mean because they’re just normal words but we use it to mean something totally different, and my Dad does create a lot of weird, very peculiar-sounding neologisms too which he often claims are legit Kashubian words but upon research it always turns out they’re not. He also has such weird behaviour that sometimes he’ll hear a word that will stand out to him for some reason, for example because it’s new to him, and then he’ll repeat it over and over and over again with no context, and sometimes over time such word will gain some new meaning for us. For example he once watched the film The Great Gatsby, and then would be saying “The Great Gatsby” all the time for a day or so, and in the end for some reason me and Sofi ended up adopting the phrase to mean something like never mind. Olek doesn’t have such inclinations, but he’s always the first to understand weird language-based jokes and such.

To give you some more specific examples, Sofi is very uncomfortable when it comes to talking about all things sexual, even though my Mum isn’t this sort of person who would discourage healthy discussion about it or who wouldn’t make her children aware of the birds and the bees when it seems appropriate. Sofi’s repulsed by all that but at the same time interested in learning about various things to do with sex, and the weirdest thing is that, if ever she does want to talk about it, ask questions and stuff, the only person she seems comfortable doing that with is me, and she says she is really embarrassed to talk about it with Mum despite Mum definitely encourages her. I say it’s weird because, well, unlike my Mum, I don’t have any practical experience in the field, so I always tell her that she should talk about it to Mum, but she doesn’t want to. Sometimes I think I should seriously consider becoming a couples’ counsellor or something like that, because people often come with things like that or their relationship problems to me when I have no idea about it because like I often say I’ve never even dated or anything. 😀 So anyway, Sofi has a problem even with the word sex, and other words around this topic like body parts, and it seems like her embarrassment about using them is part of why she finds the topic so difficult to talk about. So I figured the best way to get rid of at least that part of the problem is to change the words. It certainly doesn’t work in all situations and circumstances, but I felt that it would here and it does, though it doesn’t get rid of all Sofi’s problems, of course. So we started creating our own, new, unique sexual vocabulary. The process was really simple, and funny. We got a random and would open it at some random word, and then from then on that would be the word we used instead of some specific sex-related word, if we both agreed that it worked well and fit. Some are really crazy, for example for sex itself, we use the word biel which means whiteness in Polish, and the crazy part about it is that I often go by Bibiel so it sounds very similar. 😀 For vagina, we drew the word jabłko, which means apple, except in the end we use the word jabłco more often, which is like the opposite of a diminutive. I guess there’s no such phenomenon in English but in Polish we not only have diminutives but also an opposite thing which is used to make something sound either pejorative, or bigger than standard, or sometimes also kinda affectionate but in a sort of rougher way than when you’re using a diminutive, or just plain funnier. For us, it’s about that last thing. We made that whole vocabulary thing up before either of us had any Apple products, but even now that we do, we still use this word because Sofi got used to it, and sometimes things get quite hilarious. We also use it in other contexts now, not just to mean the actual vagina, but for example we’ll sometimes say to each other: “Shut up your apple” when we don’t really care what the other has to say, but it’s more good-humoured and teasing rather than insulting despite the way it sounds.

Also, since we’re talking about sort of intimate or taboo or politically incorrect vocabulary, we’ve invented something else quite recently, about a month ago when we had that wave of sickness go through our house. Maybe goofiness is another symptom of Covid, or maybe we were just too bored or something. But we sometimes just do have phases like that. 😀 Namely, our Dad said that someone was an asshole, and then Sofi had some weird musings that she shared out loud, about how it’s okay to use vulgar words in a derogatory way (specifically dupek (which means asshole in Polish) for men and pipa (which means pussy) for women, but it would sound a lot more inappropriate if you called someone an anus or a vagina or something like that). That made my Dad and me laugh and my Dad said that if we’d use anus (odbyt in Polish) for men, then rectum (odbytnica in Polish) would sound more appropriate for women and we bot had a fit of giggles. And then we started using these words and calling each other that and Dad happily joined because he really has some weird liking for using neologisms of his own creation that sound like horrible insults to refer to his loved ones in what’s meant to be an affectionate way. 😀 In fact, Dad seemed to have most fun with it. After a few days, however, we naturally stopped using rectum for some reason and we all referred to each other as anuses, regardless of gender. It was only for a few days until we got bored of this, but in the meantime we used that a lot and Mum looked at us as if we were crazy. I was thinking what would someone from the outside think if they just came to us and sat quietly and observed things, and hear our Dad come to us yelling excitedly: “Yo what’s up, little anuses?!” and me respond phlegmatically: “Nothing, giant anus”. They’d probably feel like involving social services or something. 😀 I think if Dad wouldn’t get so excited about it, we might have ended up using it more between each other with Sofi, but he talked like that ALL the time so it became boring and rather childish for the two of us very quickly.

Other than that, I actually already wrote a post on that same topic three years ago, specifically on a phrase “without cheese” that we use, and you can read this post

here.

How about you and your family, or other people you mingle with a lot? 🙂