[Magdalen] All in the family

[Jay Weigel]

Today while making a shopping list I put something on it that made me think
about words families use among themselves that people outside don't get
because they're "family" words, mostly made up within the family, sometimes
by the children when they are small and sometimes otherwise. In my family
of origin, we had my mother's word for what everyone else calls a thingy or
doohickey, which was "hipmaflunt" (Lord only knows where that came from!)
and our term for lemonade/iced tea mixture which was either "glenguzzle" or
just plain "GG", among others. In the family I raised with my late ex, we
had a number of words peculiar to us. "Fussling" was one, which meant kind
of random complaining. ""Frowling", a combination of frowning and growling,
was pretty much what it sounded like, and "pranky" was our Adam's rendition
of "cranky" back when he couldn't say his initial K sound, and it stuck
with us. Later on, we adopted a couple of words from the grandsons:
"peebies", which was Isaak's term for PB&Js, and "wo-wo", used
independently by both Isaak and Boogie for anything with lights and sirens.
The word I put down on the shopping list was "swoofer" which is a term for
baby wipes, used here for other purposes.

Every family has these words. We have more of them but these are the
outstanding ones.