#familect — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #familect, aggregated by home.social.
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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.
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@derwinmcgeary We have so many! My favorite #familect is our use of “be” as shorthand for “be [obstinate, grumpy, testy, inflexible, etc].” I have no idea where it comes from.
“I don’t want to!”
(exasperated) “Why are you being?”“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!”
“Don’t be.” -
I love this footnote on gibberish codes in Marina Warner's book "No Go the Bogeyman".
Reminds me of Jessica Weiss's great essay "The Secret Linguistic Life of Girls", in the sadly defunct mag Schwa Fire:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150912190724/https://schwafire.atavist.com/secret_linguistic_life_girls#language #linguistics #codes #SecretLanguage #familect #MarinaWarner
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In our #familect the t in “soft” is silent when referring to pupper doggo fur. Because a hard consonant sound could never adequately describe something so soff. #DogsOfMastodon
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@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. -
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!"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tropical-storm-idalia-hurricane-franklin-double-threat/
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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)
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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: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/taxes-suffonsified-3PlXJQze/transcript
LISTEN: https://pod.link/173429229/episode/5e5e78089e2f5e028dccf13dbc5f56e0
