[Magdalen] All in the family

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

In our house, we hang on to punch lines.

The was a wonderful story told years ago in a dramatization of Henry VIII
that ended with the line, "Or the horse may talk."

When enumerating options we could do, sometimes one of us will add, "Or the
horse may talk...."

Years ago, we used to enjoy the marvelous humor of Miss Manners.  We
sometimes will recall out of the blue some of her best lines.  I don't
recall when we did "How do you do?  How do you do?" but we often will say,
in a very polite tone, "Because it's simply impossible."

A person observing us on hidden camera would no doubt conclude that we were
certifiable, because we would be saying these lines that, to the outside
observer, make no sense.

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>