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#familect

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thinking about #familect again today and how in my trilingual household expressions shift and mutate; somehow, in translation, the expression “feeling some kind of way” became a thing of melancholy and dysthymia, and all this to say i’m feeling some kind of way today, friends.

@derwinmcgeary Our (Austrian German based) #familect has the unique word "umpoppeln" (maybe "to popple over"), derived from 80s "Popples" brand plush toys that could be turned inside out.
Unlike that English "turn inside out" or the standard but very Germany-German sounding "auf links drehen" (lit. "turn onto left"), the verb does not imply any directionality (you could "turn outside in" or "auf rechts"), even though the participle "umgepoppelt" usually implies being in the non-preferred state.

@derwinmcgeary Tricky! They're such natural parts of vocabulary as to not notice them!

Some #familect ones from @curatedjenny and me:
"Binwards" (in the direction of the bin, although not necessarily all the way into said bin)
"Böking" (The act of wrestling with an unwieldy object like a large box - Swenglish. I can't think of how to write it phonetically in English!)
"I'm small" (Feeling emotionally vulnerable)
"Ketlon" (Putting the kettle on)

I have loads of #idiolect ones too, I expect!

A house for sale in our neighborhood touted that the backyard was accessible from "both sides," which we thought was a super strange thing to highlight in a listing. Like, that's the best thing this house has going for it?

So "both sides" has become a joke in our house. When Pat saw this news story about hurricanes coming at Florida from the east and the west, he held up the screen to me and yelled, "Both sides!"

#familect

cbsnews.com/news/tropical-stor

I've been meaning to read this for years. It's charming and funny, and the politics are understated (strikingly so, given that it's set in Italy before and during WWII).

One reason the book appeals to me is that for some years I've kept a family lexicon too: a record of running jokes, catchphrases, and lore in my family (mostly my siblings)

I talked with listeners on WOSU for almost an hour last week about familect stories!

One I've already used is "human" for "humid."

Someone's child got confused and said it was "human outside" instead of "humid outside."

At the beach today, seeing lots of people because of the holiday weekend, I said it was "too human outside today." :)

news.wosu.org/show/all-sides-w

WOSU RADIOGrammar Girl Mignon Fogarty Familects are invented words that emerge from lives spent in close quarters: words, phrases and in-jokes that only families understand.

In this week's podcast, I dug in to the old saying "my sufficiency has been suffonsified." Once you start looking, it's everywhere!

Plus, Valerie Fridland looked at the long-ago origins of tax words. Did you know the Rosetta Stone contains text about taxes?

READ: grammar-girl.simplecast.com/ep

LISTEN: pod.link/173429229/episode/5e5

#GrammarGirl #podcast #linguistics
#familect #oldsayings