Do you (or does your family) use made-up words and expressions -- terms of endearment, anger, whatnot, that over the years have entered your personal lexicons? What are they and what's the story behind them?

We use the made-up word hoitney to refer to a not-so-intelligent country bumpkin type. It just sounds right, you know?

Also, in my college dorm, there was a not-so-bright lad named Bruce. Whenever anything stupid occurred, someone would say, "Duh, Bruce!" and we'd get a kick out of our own "wit." At first it was only said around Bruce, but it soon morphed and people would say it after anything bone-headed was uttered.

Believe it or not, I still say it. By now my wife gets it (as do my kids). Said "Bruce" is mythical and long-gone from my life, but his legacy lives on!

Interesting topic.
In my family a Kirstin is a whiny person full of excuses for not doing what she promised to do. Also a car that won't start but goes whhhhaaaahhhh many times to lure you into believing it will start if you just try a bit longer.

Uh-oh. Hope there are no Kristins in the group.

Sometimes a commercial saying invades family lexicons. My family says, "Now think up more yourself!" once they get someone else "started" on something, and I KNOW it was in a commercial somewhere, somehow -- but I've long forgotten the product.

From a movie;
I've been ionized, but I'm alright now.

For minor mishaps. Like bumping your elbow on a corner, or dropping a can on your foot.

Oh NE, I'm so glad you started this thread. I've thought of it several times, just not when I'm sitting at the computer.

My Italian father and his family used to say, "Saint Anthony."

Roughly translated, it means "well all right don't worry about poor little me, I'll just get along as best I can, put-upon as I am, I may just go out into the garden and eat worms, that is, if I'm able to walk and take nourishment."

Now I chuckle when I hear it coming from my pure Norwegian stepdaughter.

It so happens I wear a St. Tony (from my wife's -- non-Catholic though she is -- Vatican visit last year) around my neck! I can see it will come in handy next time I have a hankering for worms.

Ginnie -- was the diagnosis made by you or by your sons? I'm thinking it's your sons (who were probably impressed with the severe-sounding word!).

If you accidentally hurt yourself (stubbed a toe, walked into the sharp corner of a table, etc.) in my house, my dad used to say, "Little Jesus punish you." If you had done something significantly bad that day, he'd raise the stakes by saying, "See? Big Jesus punish you."

The bizarre thing is, I catch myself saying it nowadays, too (to which people go, "Huh?" unless it's my family... they know the story by now).

If somebody drops or spills something in our family we cry out "Nearly a grand piano; give the lady a mouth organ!" It came from my Irish great-grandfather but no idea where he got it from.

Once, when my daughter wanted a mental health day off from school, I wrote a note saying she was suffering from anomie, a sociological term meaning normlessness. Nary a peep from the school.

When I was small, my Old Man wrote the absence excuses in verse.

Schools are easily frightened by vocabulary in the hands of parents. You were dubbed "eccentric" (as was your dad) and given a wide berth (kind of like Mama Cass when she crossed the Atlantic on the QEII).

Great strategy!

I got a note last week....
"Please excuse Matthew's shorts. Believe it or not, the dog ate them".
(Our school has uniform)

it's not rocket surgery

A reputation for oddness, if not too pronounced, can be a major advantage in life.

A phrase in our family is "Bake Parkway," which means, "You are repeating yourself." My wife once paid an overdue electric bill at an office on Bake Parkway, and when we went by on a later occasion would point out the building.

Two words and two expressions: Scruggle, to describe a throw rug that slides around (as on a kitchen floor) and gets all bunched up. "Don't leave the rug all scruggled up like that, straighten it."

Binky, imported from some long-forgotten elsewhere and used to describe milk that, while still usable, is just about to go off. You pour some milk in your hot tea and see just a few pre-curdling flecks. Your milk is binky, boy. Five or 10 minutes from now at room temperature and you will have sour milk.

These two expressions, definitely Cockney in origin, are from my mother's side.

When someone chokes and sputters on a bite of food or sip of liquid: "Cough it up, it might be a gold watch!"

When somebody coughs hackingly, as from a cold: "It isn't the cough that carries you off... it's the coffin they carry you off in."

"Fuvva" (to rhyme with other)....a word my mother coined for one of those cosy, cuddly mohair rugs that you wrap yourself up in.

When my husband and I moved into our previous house we ended up with two chests of drawers in our rather large entrance hall. All manner of things lived in the drawers.

You couldn't say, "It's in the chest in the hall," without differentiating which one you meant.

One chest was a rather elegant antique with a glossy finish. The other was just funny old chest.

So we'd say, "It's in the shiny." Or, "It's in the funny."

The shiny is long gone. The funny sits just inside our front door in this house. And we still call it the funny.

My brother was the bringer and inventor of hip and cool catch-phrases. I'd ask where something was (ie the audio cassette, my beloved "mix tape", that he borrowed and failed to return-- no, I'm not bitter, really) and he would say "Why, I have it right here (dramatic pause), in my pocket." And this while he mimed pulling something out of his pocket with a smirk on his face.

Another of his phrases-- "Funny like monkeys, 'cause monkeys are funny." Generally his reaction (straight faced) to a joke I had tried to tell.

A favorite family word- "mingy". If something didn't fit just right, a seam needed to be eased or something needed to be moved over just a bit-- we would "mingy it in."

Where do these things come from? Mingy? Fuvva? Scruggle? It's kind of like we're Shakespeare, making up words, only neither Merriam nor Webster have heard about it yet.

We say "wingnut" for nut case. But maybe that's common usage (is it?). Also "gacky" for something gross (usually sticky-variety of gross). Finally, if something's heartwarmingly sweet, we make fun of it in a way by tilting our heads and saying, "Odie..." in a treacly high voice (like folks do when talking to babies or dogs). No idea about the etymology and couldn't provide the family lore roots for any of them, but they're there.

In NZ, wingnut is a nickname for anyone with sticky-out ears!!

Odie is the dog in the Garfield comics. And a loveable moron that Garfield disdains from a great height.

I say wingnut for somebody who is particularly obsessive or extreme in their point of view; with apologies in advance to any conspiracy theorist, frutitarian, ufo abductee, atlantis and mu cartographer or pyramids built by aliens theorist who is offended by being so called. :)

My mom used to say "Shinola" instead of "sh*t" (mostly because that dratted asterisk is so hard to pronounce). I was about 10YO and cleaning out the cabinet under the sink when I found some Shinola brand shoe polish. Ever since then, "shoe polish" has been our family cuss word.

Wow! I don't have a family word for milk but I have another dairy food! Yoghurt is digin-digin in my house because my son called it that from about one year of age.

We call skim milk "blue milk" because it appears to have a slight, bluish tinge. Either that or we're looking at breakfast through blue-colored glasses (Rose was out of pocket).

A "wingnut" is a pejorative leftist term for a conservative.

A "moonbat" is a pejorative conservative term for a lefty.

That reminds me. The Bavetta family never serves grated cheese with their pasta. We always just plunk a hunk of cheese and the grater on the table and every man for himself.

One day my Uncle Charlie, who was your typical excitable Italian, and who never met a joke he didn't want to tell twice, or six times for that matter, passed the cheese and grater to a visiting fireman, and chortled, "Here you, just ziggy, ziggy on the grater."

Uncle C died quite a while ago, but ziggyziggy is what we all call that cheese.

That cheese has its own comic strip, no? (Ziggy) And Uncle C maybe meant it as a verb (the act of ziggying the cheese) as opposed to a noun (the cheese itself). Or did you all just riff from that?

Wingnuts. Plenty to go around as both a lefthanded and a righthanded "compliment."

Yoghurt. Funny spelling. Puts the pain in your probiotics...

I have no idea but for some reason whenever my mom wanted you to do something fast she would say "run like 60 Hannas!" I always find myself wanting to say that around people who aren't of my family, but stop myself because it would take way too long to explain, as there is no explanation that I know.

My mom also used to say "I need a blanky girl" when I was little and she wanted me to lay down next to her to keep her warm.

shaky cheese is the grated cheese in a can
so dubbed by my youngest son i think and the term we now all use

the rarest thing on the beach is the name of the ball of tiny sticks and embedded shells rolled by the waves my oldest grandson found one day and presented to me by saying, "grammoe do you want to see the rarest thing on the beach?"

burnt toast is toast with extra grammoe love
(same for anything i burn on cooking)

deader than a doornail
altho i don't think i can claim this as a family only saying
no clue where it came from

In my family its dead as a doornail.

Same in mine Donna. Must have an etymology......?

Ever see a live doornail?

I thought not.

What a great topic!

Growing up, whenever my parents would kiss and it would go on a little longer than made their children comfortable, we would all shout "Ew, Groochie." I have no idea where groochie started or what it means.

Spaghetti noodles and Ramen noodles were called "haircuts," because my brother refused to roll his spaghetti on his fork, but would let the strands hang on either side of the fork, then announce he was giving his fork a haircut.

Also, before we could tell time, my parents would let us know how long something was in terms of Mr. Rogers. An episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was a half hour, so if we were going somewhere that took an hour, my parents would say "we'll be there in two Mr. Rogers." This is still used in our family to this day!

"Two Rogers" sounds quicker, but I guess you can pay the guy his respect, his being deader than a doornail (or a sweater button).

Dickens changed the cliché to "dead as a coffin nail" in the opening to A Christmas Carol.

I found this for 'as dead as a doornail'....

This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.

But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase
Dead enough for you? compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I’ve quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?
The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

Dickens changed the cliché to "dead as a coffin nail" in the opening to A Christmas Carol.

Read again, NE. Here's the direct quote:"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. "

I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

This was the line I was recalling. So he said both. Can I be partially correct then? Can I get partial credit???

mnemonics

never eat shredded wheat for the order of the directions

became...when i asked my son what did they say before shredded wheat?

was...never eat shrews and weevils

I've also heard "Never Eat Sour Watermelons" for that one.

When I was in my early teens I started calling my brother Maui. I have no idea why. I can't remember exactly when or where it came from, but it stuck. No one else uses the name, just me.

And then there's "falldown". The term appeared sometime during my high school years. I thought that it was relatively common slang until I graduated and discovered that no one outside of my high school had any idea what the term meant.
Essentially a falldown is a person who has failed at some (usually simple) task. It's generally used as part of good-natured chiding and teasing between friends.

I don't know if this is unique to my family or not, but it just occurred to me the other day that I've never heard anyone else use it: "do the books". As in, when my mother sits down at the computer to enter her daily expenditures, pay bills, do online banking, etc... she's "doing the books".

"Sho thing!" Not really an invented word, just a strange pronunciation of "sure thing".

Finally, in my family you're as likely to hear "danke" and "gesundheit" as "thanks" and "bless you". This would all seem normal enough... except no one in my family is German!

I love family vocabularies, and I think one of the greatest joys of parenthood (whenever I achieve it) will be passing mine to my offspring and encouraging them to bulk it up a bit. Some favorites from my family include:

Chobber: coined by my youngest sister when she was about five, 'chobber' refers to any act of sibling-on-sibling violence, real or in jest. (ex: Elaine's getting angry. If you don't watch out, she's gonna chobber you). I'm pretty it stems from the word clobber.

Stink the weenie: courtesy of my dad; this refers to any object of substandard quality. It orignated during a family vacation during which the hotel we stayed at provided sacks of porcupines for pillows. (Ex: This pillow stinks the weenie).

Eyecrometer (eye-CROM-eter): I wish I could remember where this one came from, as I use it all the time. An eyecrometer is the imaginary tool used to visually estimate distance and/or length. (Ex: It's not a terribly accurate measurement...I used my eyecrometer).

We also have a few family-specific sign language gestures. For instance, whenever the family is travelling on foot together, the leader of the pack (usually my dad), extended an arm straight up and raises one, two, three, four, or five fingers. The number of fingers raised indicated the speed at which we should all be walking, one being a slow, turtlish crawl, and five being world speedwalking champion pace.

You sound like you have a fun family

I have the feeling this has been done somewhere else. As I said on Ruth's 'Wisconsin', all the pages end up with some of the others' on them.

Patrick couldn't say 'toilet paper', so, "tooty patter" has gone onto our shopping lists ever since.
Unlike a lot of children, he could say hospital very well, but somehow it translated over to comfpital(comfortable) and vegpital(vegetable).
My friend sheila was Irish born and some of the words she used would get me "taspy" was irritable and cranky, usually referred to tired toddlers.
"Manky" was a word She and my mother used and meant untidy, dirty, ragged, old & tattered, or any combination of them.

I like "stink the weenie" (although it brings jolting images to mind, so I don't think I'll use it) and eyecrometer especially. Dad sounds like quite the character. Put him in a book (though I doubt he'll fit).

"Manky" sounds like it's defined. That's one manky definition.

The problem with old threads popping up is I forget what I already contributed. Then again, if I'm too lazy to go back and look, I imagine others are, too.

Some family vocabs adopt words that come into the lexicon and then leave through the back door in the dark of night. "Gnarly," for instance. I think only surfers still use it, but we used it for everything -- even dry stuff and even flat stuff (wave joke, you see). Gnarly, dude.

And it's interesting how "dude" just keeps on keeping on. We used it religiously in the 70s and here it is, as robust as ever. Unlike "groovy" and "bread" (for money) and such.

My grandmother use to say arch potatoes. I bet know one can guess what kind of potatoes they are, and for sandwich, she said sammich. Oh I forgot , she also called onions ,angerins.

My grandmother called leftovers "diaphamedlies."

"diaphamedlies." That is the best one yet.

Expression of embarrassment: "Norbs dahooey ack ack." Or when something is cheesy, just "norbs."

Once a neighbor boy, friend of my little brothers, arrived in the morning for school carpooling & was VERY excited that his family's rabbit had given birth the night before. He kept saying, over & over, "There were nine baby rabbits--one died and that left eight." My sibs & I started taking turns asking him casually, "So how many rabbits did you say there were?" & he would repeat it yet again, oblivious to the teasing. So now whenever anyone repeats unnecessarily, especially a number, one of us will say, "So how many rabbits were there?"

Then we have a number of terms that are just affectionately garbled, like fambly for "family."

Love the rabbit story, Ruth.

Rabbits are fuzzy word problems, it just goes to show.