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Post by Roquefort Raider on Apr 7, 2022 8:23:52 GMT -5
During a conversation with my wife yesterday, I had to ask "but why?" at some point, and used an expression that only our family uses: "bababawum"?
We don't even think about it anymore; we've used the expression for two and a half decades, and we usually don't even remember that it's not a real word. Its origin is as follows: one of our dear friends in Germany, a Spaniard, was just beginning to learn the language and used to pronounce the words "aber warum?" ("but why?") in a way that sounded just like bababawum. The entire lab thought it was hilarious, and kept using it. My wife and I adopted it for good. Our kids learned it from us, and I'd say it's here to stay.
Are there odd neologisms that you use in your own circle of friends/families? Or odd habits like saying "bless you" when someone farts? (we also do that without thinking).
One neologism that was born at CBR was Fly-on-the-wall's brilliant "pisscuit", describing the clump of kitty litter that forms when a cat pees. It's a most excellent word, amusing and descriptive, and there's no actual word for what it describes!
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 7, 2022 8:48:26 GMT -5
(...)
One neologism that was born at CBR was Fly-on-the-wall's brilliant "pisscuit", describing the clump of kitty litter that forms when a cat pees. It's a most excellent word, amusing and descriptive, and there's no actual word for what it describes!
Hmm, yes. That is pretty good. But I think it's one that you have to see spelled out to truly appreciate it. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2022 12:50:15 GMT -5
when my friends and I wave goodbye, we still shout: "Bon Jovi"
something we started doing in the 80's
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 7, 2022 12:55:20 GMT -5
My middle son and I tend to tell each other "Abyssinia" instead of "I'll be seeing you."
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 7, 2022 13:47:45 GMT -5
when my friends and I wave goodbye, we still shout: "Bon Jovi" something we started doing in the 80's Heh. For a few years in college and just afterward, a friend and I - mystified by the persistent popularity of Bon Jovi - used to always greet each other by saying "Jovi" accompanied by a devil horn salute. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2022 15:25:33 GMT -5
My wife and I, and some of our fellow gamers tend to conflate real world failures to failed dice rolls/skill checks, the most common being when I cannot find something I am looking for, she will ask or I will say "I failed my perception check again" so when I rooting through the fridge looking for the open package of cheese and shout to her where is it, the immediate response is-did you fail your perception check again? and when she relates a funny anecdote about such an occurrence to our friends, it usually starts with, So, Mike failed his perception check the other day when..."
-M
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Post by badwolf on Apr 7, 2022 16:34:35 GMT -5
One time many years ago a girlfriend arrived at my place and the first thing said immediately upon my opening the door was "Igottapeenow!"
I genuinely didn't understand what she said so I just stood there blinking and said "Jalapeno?"
So from that point on "jalapeno" became the word for announcing... that.
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 7, 2022 18:34:41 GMT -5
I'll pull out old radio and cartoon verbal gags, from time to time, like "Hasty Lumbego". Mostly, I will use expressions I learned in the Navy, like "When the defecation hits the oscillator" and "Busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."
I'll use Yiddish words and phrases a lot, which, despite being as WASP as you can get, I learned from Jewish actors in tv and movies. Yiddish somehow seems fitting when you express exasperation.
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Post by Duragizer on Apr 7, 2022 19:12:50 GMT -5
My father had "duplica", a portmanteau of "duplicate" and "replica". Pretty certain it was an accidental conflation; his vocabulary was atrocious.
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 7, 2022 21:21:04 GMT -5
My mother (and at least one sister) always referred to a "choirpractor," rather than "chiropractor." I used to ask her if they align the altos and tenors. It seemed to go right past my mother, who had a degree in music. My dad, who had amore developed sense of humor would just smile. Her whole side of the family is incapable of pronouncing non-English words and names. My grandmother would refer to such Italian classics as "peezuh" and "spagettuh" and my mom couldn't even get close on "quesadilla." (Kwezza-dilluh was as good as she got).
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 8, 2022 3:16:12 GMT -5
Oh, man, if we're talking about parents butchering words, well, my folks were working-class Croatian immigrants who (barely) spoke English with really thick accents, so their mispronunciations of many words were the source of no end of amusement for me and my siblings. One of my favorites was always the way they pronounced Montgomery (as in the department store): Mungo-merry.
My dad in particular garbled a lot of words which often had unintentionally amusing results, like once repeatedly referring to a pitchfork as forkpitch (my future brother-in-law found that one particularly hilarious, and would bring it up for years afterward).
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Post by MWGallaher on Apr 8, 2022 9:27:14 GMT -5
My wife was taking a medicine for a while that gave her aphasia. It was both fascinating and frankly funny to see how she would come up with inexplicable terms that made perfect sense, temporarily, in her brain, and we adopted several that we use to this day. For example, the tv remote control is the "collector". That's one where you can imagine the neural pathways in wherever our vocabulary is stored being close enough to explain the confusion: remote control -> controller -> collector. Others are more baffling, like our favorite, the "wolf cup". That means "a bowl of mixed fruit" to us.
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 8, 2022 11:24:52 GMT -5
My wife was taking a medicine for a while that gave her aphasia. It was both fascinating and frankly funny to see how she would come up with inexplicable terms that made perfect sense, temporarily, in her brain, and we adopted several that we use to this day. For example, the tv remote control is the "collector". That's one where you can imagine the neural pathways in wherever our vocabulary is stored being close enough to explain the confusion: remote control -> controller -> collector. Others are more baffling, like our favorite, the "wolf cup". That means "a bowl of mixed fruit" to us. Oh, well that's easy to explain. Bowl sounds like a wolf howling (Boooooooowooooooooollllll) and Fruit brings up Cup (fruit cup); and, thus, Wolf Cup. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 8, 2022 11:27:13 GMT -5
Oh, man, if we're talking about parents butchering words, well, my folks were working-class Croatian immigrants who (barely) spoke English with really thick accents, so their mispronunciations of many words were the source of no end of amusement for me and my siblings. One of my favorites was always the way they pronounced Montgomery (as in the department store): Mungo-merry. My dad in particular garbled a lot of words which often had unintentionally amusing results, like once repeatedly referring to a pitchfork as forkpitch (my future brother-in-law found that one particularly hilarious, and would bring it up for years afterward). Pretty much the source of Rush's Geddy Lee's name. His Polish mother's pronunciation of his given name, Gary Lee, sounded like "Geddy" to his friends and the name stuck. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Apr 8, 2022 14:53:52 GMT -5
Oh, man, if we're talking about parents butchering words, well, my folks were working-class Croatian immigrants who (barely) spoke English with really thick accents, so their mispronunciations of many words were the source of no end of amusement for me and my siblings. One of my favorites was always the way they pronounced Montgomery (as in the department store): Mungo-merry. My dad in particular garbled a lot of words which often had unintentionally amusing results, like once repeatedly referring to a pitchfork as forkpitch (my future brother-in-law found that one particularly hilarious, and would bring it up for years afterward). Pretty much the source of Rush's Geddy Lee's name. His Polish mother's pronunciation of his given name, Gary Lee, sounded like "Geddy" to his friends and the name stuck. That's also how Shemp Howard got his stage name - his Lithuanian Jewish mother's pronunciation of "Sam". He was born Samuel Horwitz. |
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