Within families, young children play a particularly influential role in the creation - and perpetuation - of neologisms and original phrases. Photo / Getty Images
The memory and meaning in our weird, family-specific words, often born of the wild minds of children.
I’m no longer certain of where my own faded memory ends and my father’s recollection begins, but he describes it this way: when I was a little girl – 4 or 5 years old – and did not want to be left alone in my room at bedtime, I would often slip out into the hallway and call to my parents downstairs. “Can you come back up,” I’d plead, “just for a little minute?”
That era of childhood is long gone, but “little minute” has remained, a fixture of our family’s insider language. “Can we talk just for a little minute?” or “I’ll be there in a little minute” is understood to request or promise a fleeting, unburdensome increment of time; my dad still says it, and so do I, and now my own young kids do, too.
I always liked that this phrase stuck around, but it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I fully grasped the power and poignancy of the language – often conceived by children – that becomes fundamental within a family’s lexicon. As a 15-month-old, my daughter would point in awe at the moon and declare it “moot,” the vowel elongated and the t emphatic. “Beautiful moot tonight,” we still say – though it has been years since she learned to pronounce the letter n – and for a moment, a past version of her is present with us again.
Most families have their own version of this, an intimate, group-specific dialect known among linguistic experts as “familylect” or “familect”. Cynthia Gordon, a professor in the linguistics department at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family, has spent much of her career studying this type of family discourse. (She personally prefers the term “familylect” but doesn’t mind the alternative: “As a linguist,” she says, “I describe how people use language, rather than prescribe it.”)
Gordon’s research focuses on the ways we create a sense of group-specific intimacy and identity through dialect, a human behaviour that transcends culture, nationality and language: “Anecdotally, this seems to be a very widespread phenomenon,” she says. “All social groups - families, organisations, friend groups - they all have specific, patterned ways of using language, and it’s through language that we bind ourselves together.”
Gordon started researching familects as a graduate student at Georgetown University 25 years ago. She was involved in a study that included parents from four families, who carried digital audiotape recorders around with them for a week. The recordings allowed Gordon to hear the way the families conversed among themselves at the dinner table, in the car, while folding laundry or cooking dinner. She quickly realised that each family had certain distinct ways of speaking.
“Listening to these families was like listening to different worlds - just entirely different worlds of language,” she says. “I became very interested in the things I kept hearing on the recording, the words that came up again and again.” Inside jokes and references are common in any close-knit group, she says, but within families, young children play a particularly influential role in the creation - and perpetuation - of neologisms and original phrases. “Everything revolved around the kids, and the language the parents used was part of that.”
She heard parents repeatedly say things like “She needs a baba now” when their toddler was due for a bottle or “she wants noo-noos” – a.k.a. noodles – “for dinner.” These types of expressions were used even when the kids weren’t present, Gordon says: “There was one example where the dad in the family was talking to the mom, after the child had gone to sleep, and he said, ‘My computer went bye-bye.’”
A family’s dialect typically evolves through natural interactions, Gordon says, which also sets it apart from the insider lingo of other social groups that more deliberately curate their style of speaking. “With families, this tends to happen spontaneously,” she says. Some of the child-inspired facets of a familect might circulate for a while and then recede; a baby eventually outgrows a “baba”. But other words persevere and attain permanence, handed down from parents to children to grandchildren.
I asked parents of teens and grown children (in real life and in online groups) to share some of the neologisms and original phrases that had become immortalised in their family groupspeak, and even within my highly unscientific sample of anecdata, a few trends emerged. Words for foods (particularly various forms of cheese) were especially common: In Jayne Hunter’s family, American cheese slices have been “flat cheese” for decades thanks to her then-4-year-old son George, who accompanied the phrase with a palm-patting motion; both the term and the gesture of translation have persisted. Numerous families offered various terms for grated parmesan in a can: shaker cheese, shaky-shaky cheese, sprinkle cheese, scratchy cheese. Amelia Ritchhart explained that, in her household, “dippadee” still applies to any form of dunking condiment – ketchup, ranch, salsa – ever since her child said it as a toddler nearly 20 years ago.
Sometimes a familect was shaped by a single, specific incident: Natalie Gulley recalled a 2010 Christmastime road trip when her family of five drove through the wintry landscape of Pennsylvania and passed towering rock walls coated in ice. Her three children marvelled at how the rock face looked like a frozen waterfall; they felt the effect deserved a specific term, and Gulley’s teen son suddenly shouted, “STEVE!” Ever since, Gulley says, frozen waterfalls (or anything resembling frozen waterfalls) have been referred to exclusively as Steves.
And, occasionally, a parent was involved in creating a family catchphrase: Christina Sherman, a mum of three in Wisconsin, explains that once, at a family meal when her now-18-year-old son was 7, he grabbed a bottle of hot sauce and began pouring it all over his food. Seeing this, Sherman’s mind was flooded with colliding waves of panic; she meant to yell wait or watch it, she says, but instead blurted – with vaguely unhinged intensity – “EAT IT!”
“We all laughed till we cried,” she remembers. “They’re all teens and young adults now. And still a common phrase here is, ‘Do you want any Eat It?’”
There were lots of blended words – “What a glormy night!” Heather Newman’s 4-year-old son said more than 12 years ago, and gloomy, stormy skies have been “glormy” ever since. A calamitous scenario is dubbed a “disastrophe” in Andi Barnett’s family, thanks to her precocious former preschooler.
Beyond the more intuitive amalgamations of spoken language, other words and phrases emerge straight from the beautifully bewildering depths of a toddler’s mind: Jeneé Hensley remembers that her oldest daughter hated the way the seams on her socks felt on her feet and would cry about “the teens and toons” rubbing her toes the wrong way; the family has never stopped calling those seams “the teens and toons”. When my daughter was around 2, she referred to “grapes” as “beaks” (as in, the mouth of a bird); none of us could quite figure out how she landed there, but we loved it anyway. We’ve kept it in use ever since, in part to ease the startled pang we felt when – one day, out of nowhere – our girl very clearly asked for grapes, and we realised that the Beaks Epoch had unceremoniously come to a close.
That’s the thing about a child’s contribution to the family dialect: the stages of childhood and parenting are constantly transforming at breathtaking speed, and it doesn’t take long to feel far from the 2-year-old who asked for a bowl of beaks. Language is a way to bind ourselves together, as Gordon notes – but where children are involved, it also helps us hold on to the bygone eras of our shared journey.
“I think these neologisms are always a bit nostalgic,” says Newman, the mom whose son coined “glormy”. “The ones our kids create remind us of what seem like simpler times.”
Gordon grew up with her sister and their mother. When her sister was little, Gordon remembers, she called cicadas “zweeyew” because of the sound they make, an onomatopoeia that was enthusiastically adopted by Gordon and their mother as well. “And now my sister uses that word with my nephew, who is 10,” Gordon says. “My mother is no longer with us. But when I hear my nephew use this word, it’s a way of keeping the past connected to the present. It’s a way of celebrating family history.”
The quotidian mundanity, humour and randomness of that history is precisely what makes it special. Behind every Eat It and Steve and moot is a snapshot in time: The dinner when everyone laughed hysterically; the holiday road trip when the kids noticed a sheen of ice on boulders; the voice of a toddler with her face tilted toward a full moon. It’s impossible to preserve every detail of those originating episodes over years or generations, as memories erode and witnesses depart; my father is the only one who can still picture his long-ago preschooler summoning him to tuck her in. But the language born of those moments becomes an indelible part of who we are – a form of memory and meaning that endures, long after our little minute has passed.