Private Slang

Many families and other close-knit groups seem to develop a private set of slang that can seem baffling to outsiders. (For example, the designation "Real True XXX" and the welcome "Please don't kill us with sheep" that originated on this site.) What are some of these expressions that you have encountered? Do you think their value in cementing group culture outweighs the possibility of seeming exclusive and tribal?

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[J. Random Scribbler]

When I first started following the Left Behind deconstruction, I picked up this group's inside jokes through people being quick to explain them to anyone who asked. Knowing those references helped me feel like I belonged, even when I was just lurking and hadn't said a word.

On the other hand, I've seen places where the local slang seemed to be designed to keep people out, and nobody would explain it. I didn't feel welcome and generally didn't hang around.

So I think expressions and inside jokes can actually be a win/win -- both cementing group identity for existing members and making new ones feel welcome -- depending on the group's willingness to share them.

One example was the old alt.callahans newsgroup back in the Usenet days. They had all manner of slang and inside references, but if you'd read the books, you already knew a bunch of them, so it was easy to feel at home. And the people were generally happy to explain all their traditions they'd developed apart from the books. That was a fun place.

[Coleslaw]

We refer to our family vacations as forced marches because we (and by "we" I mean my husband) try to cram so much into them.

Tiger Droppings, a largely sports oriented web site which doesn't bother with civility, uses the word Germans to designate anything the regulars think is foolish. Asking the origin of the term Germans, is of course, Germans, but a little discreet Googling reveals it comes from the scene in Animal House in which John Belushi's character asks if the US gave up after the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor.

[Karen]

My husband and I meow at each other. I forget that I do this and that such behavior is not exactly standard in the world. We have dozens of family slang terms, including my favorite "stinkness" which my younger son coined at age 2.

[Froborr]

"Noon-thirty"--Self-explanatory, I think. Used to refer to 12:30 when people want to be annoying.

"Downstairsium"--A small, cafeteria-style or short-order eatery on the ground floor of an office building, which caters mostly to the workers in that building and is usually open only for breakfast and lunch.

"Snu-snu"--Sexual intercourse, usually of the form "[name of person speaking] want snu-snu!" From a Futurama episode.

At anime fandom, there used to be (they thankfully seem to be dying out) a thing among younger attendees called "shout-memes." These were call-and-response phrases that someone would just shout in a crowded hallway, and other people (usually strangers) would shout back. The most common was "Marco!"/"Polo!" (as in the poolside game), but also common were "I lost the game!"/groans and anger, "What time is it?"/"Adventure Time!" and "Buttscratcher!"/"Buttscratcher!" (That last, since it was self-perpetuating, was by far the most rage-inducing.)

In the particular case of shout-memes, I think they do serve a purpose of allowing a young person, possibly in a strange place and surrounded by strangers, to immediately feel part of a community. However, they are also *spectacularly* annoying to everyone else, and I'm glad they seem to be fading out in the last year or so.

[Nenya]

My youngest two siblings were three and five when Fellowship of the Ring came out, and we immediately began to refer to them as "the Hobbits." They're in their early teens now and I'll still sometimes use the term for the two of them collectively, even though both of 'em are taller than me now.

"Figgins!" as a replacement swearword comes from Terry Pratchett's Guards, Guards! in which someone is threatened with having "his figgin placed upon a spike." Figgin means "raisin bun", apparently. Middle sister and I (used to) use this constantly ("Oh, figgins!"), along with the phrase "Badger, mushroom, shrimp!" as a sort of personal passcode. (One will text the other "Badger!" and the other will reply "Shrimp!") Pretty sure this comes from BadgerBadgerBadger.com (note: automatic animation loads).

"The thing with the stuff in it" -- "I am having trouble remembering the exact word I mean, but you know, the thing we were just talking about, with the stuff, you remember don't you? Thingies!"

"commentariat" -- seen at Making Light. Blog commenters and their comments, as a collective entity.

"Your mom" -- I only ever say this to people whose mom is also my mom.

Adding -en to various English words to make plurals, in the style of Anglo-Saxon words like "women" or "oxen", is a linguistics joke that I don't think is unique to my friends and me. Boxen, faxen, iconen, telephonen (or, famously, "fen" as plural of (sci-fi) "fan"). But Best Friend and I do this with word endings from the Ragi language in CJ Cherryh's books too. Plurals go to -i or -iin, so "greeting cardi," "billy goatiin," "don't kill us with sheepiin." Or we'll address famous real people by fictional honourifics: ker Hillary Clinton, Obama-aiji, nand'Fred Clark.

And fandom, of course, has a whole slew of these.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Quack!

For some reason, we quack at Discworld Cons. Apparently this goes back to Pat Harkin saying something about the people on stage being "sitting ducks", so now the audience quacks, and occasionally makes whole farmyard noises, at those on stage (particularly Pat Harkin, even when he was being the narrator of the Rocky Horror Discworld Show*).

And yes, it does get annoying. (Though, as narrator, he had a hunter's lure in his pocket, and quacked back.)

TRiG.

* RHDS was my introduction to Rocky Horror. "Thunder rolled," said Pat. "It rolled a six," roared the audience. Awesome.

[Mike Timonin]

My wife and I refer to things being "hermeneutically sealed". Yes, we know what hermeneutic actually means. Friends of mine had a daughter who, when an infant, referred to socks as "gookums" - no one knows why. My wife and I now use "gookums" to refer to Christmas stockings. "Pierogies with mushroom sauce and big sausages" is the response to my eldest when she asks what we're having for dinner (for the Nth time) - she does not like Pierogies, or mushrooms, or big sausages. My sister and I used to play a "game" in the back of the car called "the Yes-No game" - one of us would say something - "cats" for instance - and the other would said "yes-no-yes-no-yes-no-yes-no" as fast as possible and then end on either yes or no, and announce "the answer is yes!" (or no, as the case would be) I don't believe there were any other rules. "The yes-no game" is now short hand for any sort of utterly pointless activity, especially to fill time while waiting to get to somewhere or start something.

[cjmr]

Our family slang often includes words that the current youngest member of the family mispronounces, for instance, right now we are keeping our food cold in the 'fridger', and carry 'umbrerllellas' when it is raining.

[Lonespark]

Oh, yeah, cjmr, we have a bunch of that too. YuleBaby was a big source of it. For a while, dog was "rashi," rabbit was "hoppy," bird was "peep" etc.

She also did a thing where all food was referred to as cheese, but we didn't copy it because it was confusing. LammasBaby, in his day, contributed numerous gestures that meant certain kinds of food.

[Lonespark]

"Snu-snu"--Sexual intercourse, usually of the form "[name of person speaking] want snu-snu!"

Bwahahaha! Yeah, we had that going for a while, but it never really caught on.

Somewhere, maybe Captain Awkward, or The Pervocracy, people were talking about their sex-codes. Somebody's was "To the Bat-Cave!" And then possibly Cliff Pervocracy talked about going, to partner, "I have a plan that will get both of us laid!"

[Lonespark]

I guess most of mine come from the SCA, and everybody was always willing to explain them, and they were fun to learn even though some of the memes were stupid and a few potentially harmful.

There was the kingdom/locality shout-meme, where someone would yell "Outlands!" or "Al-Barran!" or whatever and everyone else would scream their lungs out in echo. If you weren't from (place) usually you'd do it and then add your own shout after.

There was the time system: Too Damn Early, Coffee, 3 o'clock, and Dark.

[cjmr]

Oh, and we also use "noon-thirty" and also "o' dark-thirty". (The latter means 'way too damn early').

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Ah, from my little sister comes the name "gekki" for any form of pasta.

In the book The Power of Babel, the linguist John McWhorter uses this sort of in-group slang and jokes as a metaphor to explain why smaller and older languages tend to be more grammatically complex. Young languages are simple, and widespread languages are simple. A lot of the corners got knocked off Latin and English, while Welsh still has its baroque complexities (and American Sign Language and Tok Pisin haven't yet had time to develop theirs).

TRiG.

[cjmr]

My mom used to say 'curse, swear, mutter, grumble' when she'd have preferred to use a stream of expletives. Husband and I just say 'expletive deleted' in that circumstance, thanks to the internet.

[Coleslaw]

Ah, from my little sister comes the name "gekki" for any form of pasta.

That actually makes perfect sense to me. My son and my husband always had trouble understanding my nicknames for the cats, and I'd think Popcorn to Poppy to Moppy to Moppet to Moptop, why am I even having to explain this?

[Mike Timonin]

My mom used to say 'curse, swear, mutter, grumble' when she'd have preferred to use a stream of expletives.

Dad says "grumble, grumble, mutiny, mutiny"

[Timothy (TRiG)]

And any cat of unknown name is called "Pushkins", of course.

TRiG.

[chris the cynic]

My family tends to, or at least did at one time, incorporate large amounts of quotations from movies into our conversations. It could be difficult for other people to follow because if you haven't seen, say, Real Genius then hearing things like:
"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates who said, 'I drank what?'"
"Your mother puts licence plates in your underwear, how do you sit?"
"20 points higher than me, thinks a big guy like that can wear his clothes?"
"Hasn't anyone told you to make sure your optics are clean?"
And so on, just tossed out in casual conversation as if they make perfect sense (they do, in a "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" kind of way) can make it difficult to understand what's going on. And that's just one movie.

Aliens is probably also required viewing if you're going to understand my family.

-

In addition we have some terminology that the wider world doesn't seem to have adopted.

Remote controls, being covered in buttons, are known as "buttons". ("TV buttons, VCR buttons, Cable buttons, so on.)

Real Genius, which I mentioned above, is "The Popcorn Movie."

Items of clothing are named after the body part they go over. (I can't find my feet --> I can't find my shoes. My eyes are missing --> Where the hell are my glasses?)

The ready to eat (headless) cooked chicken that can be purchased in many supermarkets is known as chicken-head because I-don't-know-why. I think it was my fault, but I was very young at the time. It might have been a way to shorten, "chicken without a head" or something. Really have no idea.

Bread and pizza crust is known as bones. My sister gets credit, I believe, from when she explained that she liked the bread just fine, she just wasn't eating the bones. (When she was little she wouldn't eat bread crust.)

Safe place means place where it will be safe from everyone including you so never put anything in a safe place because you'll never find it again, based on everyone in the family losing things after putting them in safe places.

I have a feeling there are many more, by my memory is kind of crap and it's been a while since the family was really a functioning unit.

[chris the cynic]

And in cjmr's fashion we had:

faghetti
snake (steak)
cakees (car keys)

And probably other things but those are the ones that I remember.

And, getting of of mispronunciation, for much of my life, thanks to my older sister's younger days, "tape it" meant "fix it" regardless of whether or not tape would actually be employed in such repairs. Regardless of whether or not tape could conceivably be useful in such repairs.

[Lonespark]

My son has expressed his appreciation for eating snake.

My favorite kid-language thing so far was The Vampire State Building.

[Akedhi]

@chris the cynic

My family does that too, where we have entire conversations that consist of movie quotes. Different movies, though. Lots of Star Wars, musicals, and Disney (probably due to having had lots of little girls and lots of princess movies coming out when I was a kid). Oh, also The Princess Bride.

Does anyone else's family do the thing where there are specific sort-of MST3K lines that are said at various points in movies that you watch all the time?

[chris the cynic]

Oh, also The Princess Bride.

Almost any sign of the form, "Prepare to..." will get my mom to say, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. Prepare to [whatever]." And I generally join in. On a ski lift, sign says, "Prepare To Unload," and, if there's no one else on the same chair and nothing much going on conversation wise, and it hasn't become a dead horse that day yet, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. Prepare to unload."

[Amaryllis]

chris the cynic: Safe place means place where it will be safe from everyone including you so never put anything in a safe place because you'll never find it again
Are you my mother?

[Ross]

Among my family, there are three go-to phrases:

"It was just four little pieces of flagstone," to indicate that an endeavour has gotten out of hand.
"Did you hear that Worf is going to be on Deep Space 9?" to indicate that someone is repeating an earlier conversation (it references an incident wherein my mother learned that Michael Dorn was joining the cast of Deep Space 9, but for about a month, was unable to remember that she'd already told us that).
"You're in my way, sir," to someone who is blocking your path.

[Nenya]

My family certainly does movie-quote things. The only one I can remember right now is "These mashed potatoes are soooo creamy," which I think is from While You Were Sleeping. It comes up, to great giggles from my mother, any time someone is trying to compliment her cooking.

chris the cynic:

My family does clothing --> body part as well (me: "Sweetie, hang on a second, let me put in my ears" *turns on hearing aid*) AND "safe place" = "will never be found, ever."

Lonespark: The Vampire State Building

That is amazing.

[Nenya]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Exactly. :D

(How much do I love that "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" IS a "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"?)

[Nenya]

And a quote from a test my father once wrote for his students:

Q: How do badgers find their food?
A: a) digging b) hunting c) foraging d) very delicious, thank you!

"Very delicious, thank you!" has thus passed into family parlance.

[cjmr]

Ross' post reminded me of another thing my mom says:

"Now we just have to cut it out and put it together." Used when you have done 10% of the project which has used 90% of the time available, and have to move on to the other 90% of the project (which will use the other 90% of the time). Refers back to an incident where the sewing pattern required a particularly complex cutting layout on the fabric.

[Devorah]

My family is full of quotes. Often when someone meets one sister first, then the whole family, they are amazed that we use same phrases!

Lots of movie quotes, Sandlot - 4-EVER said in really weird voice, plus so many already mentioned.

My favorite thing i say is "Missy". I use it whenever i talk to any girl: dogs, grownups, babies or strangers. I used to teach Sunday school and the new girls would be so confused when i would call them Missy. The best thing about this though is my co-worker now calls people Missy. I think it is hilarious that i have rubbed off on her!

[Nick Kiddle]

With xCLP, I have Danse Macabre for spaghetti alla carbonara (he used to pronounce it "cabra cabra") and "buy some extra-evey" to mean making a payment on my electricity key meter. With my fiancee, I'll often say "bloke are not clever" when I want to disclaim a compliment, or refer to her as my Harriet Vane when I'm feeling particularly vulnerable. But my sister and I have the most history together and therefore the best stories.

My dad used to mangle familiar jokes, mostly deliberately. A favourite was "What would happen if pigs could fly? The price of bacon would go up. *Assume an earnest expression* Well it would, because if they could fly away they'd be harder to catch for slaughtering." My sister referred to that the other day on twitter when I tweeted "Alcohol and calculus don't mix: never drink and integrate."

//"Your mom" -- I only ever say this to people whose mom is also my mom.//

My sister and I often refer to our mother as "your mum". When I'm talking to my dad, I tend to call her "your ex-wife". But that's not the funny this made me think of. One day, xCLP was answering back in typical 6-year-old style and I decided to sink to his level. "Oh yeah? Your MUM." Trying to insult your siblings with "your mum" is silly enough, but (legally speaking) his mum is ... me.

[Mike Timonin]

remote controls, being covered in buttons, are known as "buttons"

Here, they are "sticks", as in "stick of powah!" We do Princess Bride and Real Genius and other sources as appropriate. My current PB quote is, when referencing the gathering of more than one of a thing, "and there are four of us, if we find the lady. Hello, lady!"

My wife, who is lurking, apparently, says I must state that my family name is "Dingo", due to some odd combination of Seinfeld ("Maybe the dingoes ate your baby!"), her stoner friends (who found the Seinfeld quote particularly amusing), and Rudyard Kipling's "The Chant of Old Man Kangaroo," such that I am summoned thusly - "Dingo, dingo, Dude man [or Dad, dad] Dingo!" My eldest once, when asked, told a doctor that my name was Dingo. So.

[Madhabmatics]

We use one of my friends names as a slang term for "Marrying a professor."

[Mike Timonin]

Madhabmatics - is that something that you need a slang term for on a regular basis?

[Madhabmatics]

Oddly enough, yes.

[Amaryllis]

"These mashed potatoes are soooo creamy"
My daughter once turned to a guest at dinner and asked, very politely, "May I serve you to the mashed potatoes?"

(Hey, the potatoes may not have been creamy, but they weren't all that savage!)

That one hung around for a while.

And haven't I told you about my brother and the nose hozzle? When I moved out, I had to re-learn the name of the spray attachment that goes on the end of the garden hose, because hose nozzles had been nose hozzles to us for so many years.

[Kirala]

My family also talks extensively in movie quotes, Princess Bride and Galaxy Quest being big go-tos. My sisters and I actually once spent ten solid minutes in a car trying to figure out the source of the quote "My apologies!" which one of us had used without remembering the original context. (We eventually realized that we were all thinking of the bit in the 1994 Little Women when John Brook is apologizing for Laurie's rude shouting out of a snow-covered window.)

Back when we still had a dog (sadface), a "dead whale cake" was a walk. This arose from cleverly spelling out the word so the dog did not know what we were discussing, and then some member of the family misunderstood "double-you-ay-ell-kay" as "dead whale cake."

I suspect that the random Dutch we inherited from my grandparents is corrupted enough that only my family would understand what we were saying...

[chris the cynic]

I suspect that the random Dutch we inherited from my grandparents is corrupted enough that only my family would understand what we were saying...

That's how new languages are made. Make sure to pass it on to future generations and in a while you may have originated a language.

[Caretaker of Cats]

"I eated the purple berries" means I'm feeling awful due to something food related. My best friend and I Darmok Ralph Wiggum quotes a lot.

[sarah]

My family uses phrases of bastardized Italian, mostly picked up from my grandmother. She used to call my cousin and me "children of no one" in Italian when we were teenagers, because we'd come to her house in ratty jeans and sweatshirts. So that's become part of the family lexicon.

[Jake]

My family of origin does a lot of extending irregular plurals or conjugations onto words that are not (in contemporary English in our dialect) irregular. So the plural of house is hice and the plural of mouse is mice, the past tense of saw is sew (rhymes with ew!), and so on.

We also have some particular lexical items, some of which are just words in other languages (my dad's family is very multilingual and lives kind of all over the West), but some of which are very strange. For example, a sharp drop or cliff of which one must be careful is a 'hotel'. This lead to a hilarious instance once where we were all hiking in the mountains and we passed a group going the other way. They asked us if the route was very difficult and my uncle replied, "oh no, it's fine. There are a couple hotels, but otherwise it's not dangerous at all!"

My mom is an academic and many of the people in her department had children that were very approximately the same age. We were collectively known as "profspring" (there is some debate about the number of 'f's in that word).

[Jake]

Um.. I meant to say the plural of house is hice and the plural of spouse is spice. I am actually aware that most English speakers think the plural of mouse is mice.

Also the plural of moose is meese. You wouldn't think this would come up often, but that's because you didn't live in Toronto when Mel Lastman was mayor.

[Jake]

remote controls, being covered in buttons, are known as "buttons"

Here, they are "sticks", as in "stick of powah!"

Heh. In my family it was called "the doohicky". But it was called that consistently, and nothing else was. I had no idea that doohicky was one of those words that just meant "the item whose name I forget" until I was in my late teens.

[Nenya]

Yes, the plural of spouse is spice, which I find really adorable in a poly context. :-)

My dad also often intentionally misuses words in a way that it's obvious what he means and also obvious that he's doing it wrong on purpose: "I'm inaudible" for "I can't hear you" or "I'm invisible" for "I can't see you" are the two biggest ones. Possibly things he can't write are "illegible" as well.

Another is describing really tasty food as "edible", which I'm pretty sure comes from a Russian friend of ours who was learning English when I was about 13, and mixed up "edible" and "delicious." I have several times unintentionally insulted someone's cooking by exclaiming that it was "Edible!" when I meant that I really liked it a lot.

[Ross]

@Nenya: Wait, so do you mean that in a poly context, Spice are the variety of life?

[Timothy (TRiG)]

And the little metal thingumibob for opening the top of the range (solid fuel cooker) is called a hugimaflip (the h is silent, but I for some reason feel it should be there; the g is soft). I once asked my brother how he thought this should be spelled, and he came up with you jimaflip. We then spent some time working out a definition of the verb to jimaflip, but nothing stuck. (I think we settled on to talk nonsense, but it was never actually used.)

TRiG.

[Brin]

Nenya: Another is describing really tasty food as "edible"

The greatest and only compliment my dad can give food-wise. (The rest of us are unsure if there are different levels of liking he doesn't distinguish in speech, or if to him the only categories of tastiness really are "edible" and "inedible".)

[kittehonmylap]

Hmm. We also do a lot of the communicating in movie quotes. Pirates of the Caribbean is a big one, as is O Brother Where Art Thou. So any time someone says something about needing "another one" of something, the other person goes into "a bigger one! a better one! that one!" etc. O Brother Where Art Thou shows up in "Mah hurr", and the "horny toad" line (which gets used any time toads or horniness are brought up). Galaxy Quest and Princess Bride are also frequently used. "Frak" is my default can't-swear-swearing.

When I was little I would ask for my vegetables "dop"- this referred to the way they were prepared/served, meaning raw with no dip, no dressing, no sauce, nothing, just vegetables. (I was an odd child.) My family didn't keep this, but my 20-years-older cousin's family did. Which I found highly surprising when I heard her use it a few years ago, after having not heard it for a long while.

We call all adorable-but-annoying animals "weiners". So a cat sleeping in your lap when you need to get up, or sticking her face in your face in the morning to wake you up, is being a weiner. This can also be applied to a human. Oddly enough, my mother's ex-husband's family also uses this turn of phrase. And cats routinely get spoken to in lolspeak. And all cats are kittehs. And everything is kitteh's fault.

DH and I do a lot of meta-jokes, which have been going for so long that they're several generations removed of meta. (Think your-mom jokes, which then get turned into "you know who does ____?" and the other person goes "your mom" or "your penis" or "the kitteh". The response to which eventually turned into "no, _____" (the original, correct answer). Or "you know what's big?" "Your penis?" "No, trees, silly!" "Oh, I thought you were going to say the kitteh!" Etc.)

One thing I've found is that I rarely find the various permutations of my family using the slang when "outsiders" can hear. I find myself avoiding it so as not to alienate the non-family. But conversely, if I explain the slang, I can then use it around you; it means that you're now in the family.

[Mike Timonin]

"Frak" is my default can't-swear-swearing.

We use "frell".

[Ross]

DH and I do a lot of meta-jokes, which have been going for so long that they're several generations removed of meta. (Think your-mom jokes, which then get turned into "you know who does ____?" and the other person goes "your mom" or "your penis" or "the kitteh". The response to which eventually turned into "no, _____" (the original, correct answer). Or "you know what's big?" "Your penis?" "No, trees, silly!" "Oh, I thought you were going to say the kitteh!" Etc.)

This reminds me of an exchange I overheard a decade or so ago:

"You can't just go comparing your balls to my balls. There's just no comparison; it's like comparing something really small, like, say, your balls, to something really big, like, say, Jupiter."

(I may have found this funnier because of the effects of something more apropos a previous discussion thread, which made me experience everything that night as a mid 90s full-motion-video adventure game.)

"Frak" is my default can't-swear-swearing.

I like to up the ante with "Godsdamned motherfracker" Because "Godsdamned" is a fun word to say.

[Nenya]

@Ross: in a poly context, Spice are the variety of life?

Ha! I hadn't thought of it that way--more like spicy, comforting things like cinnamon--but that works too.

@Brin: Delighted to hear "edible" is more common than I thought!

[Nenya]

Isn't "frak" Battlestar Galactica, and "frell" Farscape? I definitely use both as often as I use the equivalent Earth-standard vernacular.

[Mike Timonin]

Nenya: Indeed. But we watched Farscape long before Battlestar, and frell stuck while frak did not.

[Lonespark]

"Frak" is used in our household. I think it works best because it's quite close to the actual word. I previously/still use "Frick" and "Frigging" (although now I sometimes think of that being a sort of accidental prayer and it can help to defuse the situation...)

[Nenya]

Yes, so do I, but she's not my goddess, so I always feel awkward about it. :P

[Laura G]

My family also called remotes "the buttons." My inlaws never did, as far as I know, but once when I was tired and slipped and asked m y husband where "the buttons" got to, he handed me the remote, so who knows?

Just this week, my husband and I coined a new one. We were goofing around, and for some reason started accusing each other of not liking deer (yeah, I don't know, either, and I was there). I called him a "deerist," and then we both started cracking up and, since then, calling each other "dearest" and then acting offended.