"Words your family use" Topic

What words your family use for stuff. To us a remote control (TV, DVD etc) is a 'flicker'.

On Fireworks Night the taper used to light the fuses became
--> Tapir --> Anteater, with me saying things such as "is your anteater lit?"

When playing HALO with my sons, Warthogs, depending on the weapon mounted are either Dakka Hogs or 'splody Hogs

Smashed potatoes

Over shoulder boulder holders

Petrov pak'd a pile of panzers

One Ringworld to house them all, one Ringworld to bind them. One Ringworld to hide them all, from the Chaos that finds them.

Remote controls in husjanner are 'boglers'

monthiversary (celebrating our wedding anniversary every month)

"Ralph!"

OK, start with "the nose goes", which is when someone has to do an undesirable chore, the person who is asking says "The nose goes." and whoever is the last one to put their finger on their nose has to do the task.

Now upgrade that from "the nose goes" to "throw up the moose" in which you have to make moose antlers on your head to avoid the task. This requires both hands, so it is a bit harder and often catches someone who was in the midst of doing something rather than someone with idle hands. Yeah, whatever. Tough. You lost. Do it.

Now equate "throw up" with regurgitation and the English euphamism for vomit, "ralph". Ralph now is a shorthand for "throw up". Since we are being lazy and looking for shorthand, no other words are required. The procedure is the same as "throw up the moose".

This is the most normal locally idiomatic thing that my family does and also the one that requires the least explanation to others.

My wife comes from York, and I'm a Geordie, so we tend to communicate in a strange mixture of dialects that doesn't bear much relation to English.

We're currentlly living in Kent – I don't think any of the locals understand a word we say!

We call them "walkers," but I've heard others call them "biters" or lamebrains."

Nothing that won't be bleeped.

My dad was a fountain of Militarisque sayings like "All I want to see is Ass and Elbows" when he wanted us to get to work. My faorite was the consternation my son had when my Dad use to bark: "Hump Ass Boy". We found out later that he could not understand why Grandpa was calling him a hump ass boy.

monthiversary (celebrating our wedding anniversary every month)

That's soooooooo cute

"Sammich" for sandwich. Drives my wife nuts.

Not family, but a colleague of explained that the tendency of programmers and applications to anticipate what we want and do it for us resulting in brain-dead sheep users who don't understand the technology they use and a nightmare of "capability" that only does what someone thought we wanted instead of what we need is "clever" programming. Clever is now my favourite derogatory term.

See how the application automatically corrects the spacing errors around the periods I put in sentences so I can't type an ellipsis … isn't that clever?