The wonderful neologisms known as familect phrases

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A familect or familylect is a distinct lexicon (Italian: lessico familiare) that some families or groups develop: expressive phrases for persons, pets, things and imaginary things, usually mixed in with inside jokes, deliberately mispronounced words, shorthands, language play, metaphor, imagery, absurdity and sometimes movement. Familect phrases are neologisms – newly coined words, usages or expressions (a.k.a. coinage, nonce words, portmanteau words) that are likely meaningless outside their user group.

They can be wonderfully inventive and rich in figurative language. Why use them or come up with them? “Basically, it’s fun”, according to The English Project’s Bill Lucas (cited in Ough). Familects epitomose inside jokes. In Susie Dent’s family, “… if I’m ever looking daydreamy… someone… might murmur ‘Potatoes’…” (cited in Ough). Anne Helen Petersen has had a familect with a friend for 21 years: When the one says, “Oh no”, the other replies, “The air is filling with sand”, a reference to a line in The English patient.

Petersen’s dogs have many nicknames, all of which they apparently recognise; she also calls her Steve Stove, Stoveeno, Stove the Bove, Stovine the Bovine, Green Bean and Green Beaner, and Peggy Pegs, Peego, Peegs, Leegs, Peeg-a-Leeg and Three Leg Pegs.

According to Ough, a familect is like a “linguistic glue” that helps hold a family or group together, a comfort language that reflects part of its history. It reinforces its stories, rituals and memories, and is usually transmitted between generations “as verbal heirlooms of sorts” (Kathryn Hymes, cited in Ferrari), within a group, or between one group and another.

Familect phrases may arise “when existing words fall short in describing something” (Thorne), or for items for which no standard (or only a boring) name exists. According to Tom Ough, mee-cro-wah-vay forms part of Nigella Lawson’s familect. And a TV remote control has been called the flickybox, the blodger or the dibba-dabba (credited to Bill Lucas, cited in Ferrari). According to Tony Thorne, helicopter and velcroid (intrusive parents or neighbours), howler (baby) and chap-esse (female) likely originated in familects (cited in Ferrari). Thorne: “As kids fumble and play with sounds and meaning, their cutesy word experiments can be picked up by the whole family”. Familect is “undergirded by hours and months and years and decades of time spent in each other’s company. In other words: the language of actual intimacy, the sort we cultivate with kin and close kith” (Petersen).

Some initiatives collect familect phrases. Published by The English Project in 2008, Kitchen table lingo is “a tribute to the daily inventiveness, creativity and imagination of ordinary English speakers crafting words for themselves” (cited in Ferrari). Familect phrases may be “deeply bizarre, fairly dirty, [and] often includ[e] physical accompaniments (a specific weird dance move you do when request[ing] a specific item in the house)… when explained to others, [they] have about the same effect as explaining your very weird, very elaborate dream. The logic, the meaning, so often falls apart entirely” (Petersen).?

Petersen notes that Covid-19 lockdowns have fuelled familects: “As the barriers between public and private have disintegrated, our private words and phrases and ticks are creeping into our ‘normal’ speech... We spend more time talking with each other, in our intimate spaces and using our familect, than in public space… It’s like when you’ve been learning a new language long enough to start dreaming in it. Our primary dialect has become a familect.”?

Familects “let us harness and shoot off feelings” (Petersen). Born out of a yearning for community and meaning, a familect creates a discourse community, such as in Culture Study (annehelen.substack.com/):

[Familect] themes are legible in [Culture Study’s] recurring thread topics and… channel rooms, which focus on specific culture consumption, productivity, class, and work culture, but also different ways of thinking through our place and value in the world… and community… Topics expand and refine; some are temporarily archived and replaced by others… all of it feels like we’re trying, trying, to find the vocabulary to communicate with each other: to make ourselves visible and knowable while also seeing and knowing others; to cultivate fellowship and intimacy when it remains elusive elsewhere; to avoid the exclusion that sometimes accompanies familect; to remain intentional about welcoming people with less fluency (Petersen).

Further, nowadays, perhaps most of our conversations about building community take place online:

Some of us have never seen it modeled or felt included within a real, robust community; others yearn for a previous experience that’s simply not reproducible. We’re looking for more cogent ways describe the lack and hope, the problem and the cure… part of what we’re doing here is finding support and encouragement as we try to bolster those relationships. And part, too, is refining our thinking… in a way that makes the soil of our lives fertile for other forms of community to actually germinate and grow. (Petersen)

While sharing one’s familect can serve to welcome an outsider into one’s ‘clan’, such phrases can also shut people out and can create us vs. them attitudes – as Montell points out in Cultish: The language of fanaticisms. She focuses on the verbal elements that make a variety of communities cultish. In her view, some groups, brands and social media practitioners use language to exert power.

Some familect phrases and their meanings

poopleg?nger – when an imaginary dark double, clothed in your poop, haunts your every move (accompanied by a weird dance) [1]

horse water – the musty water left in a re-usable bottle [2]

fnord – when fnord is declared, the utterer of a statement that does not logically follow from the previous statement must explain the link [3]

yachting – a dog dragging its undercarriage across the floor to relieve an itch [4]

glopping – the sloppy sound of a dog licking its bum [5]

chupley – one family’s word for a cup of tea [6]

disrevelled – looking the worse for wear after a night on the town [7]

commess – a blend of ‘complete’ + ‘mess’ [8]

testiculating – waving one’s hands while talking bollocks [9]

purpoo – purple [10]

zigackly – exactly [11]

full of hands – having one’s hands full [12]

fleezing – freezing (e.g. “fleezing as a flep”) [13]

yampy – when someone is being whiney [14]

norman – a person who is annoying or who is failing to understand something quickly [15]

salamander – if a member of a group says something offensive to another member [16]

doctor Johnson’s at the door – your nose is running [17]

clunch – a bad-tempered and stubborn person [18]

to pancrock – to run around in a panic; also, to pancrock in a wee dish [19]

chickens – money (e.g. “The kids need lunch money. There should be chickens in my purse.”) [20]

snurfing – to loudly sniff while sleeping [21]

gribbling – filling time when you arrive somewhere earlier than you’re meant to, named for the Gribble Inn, where it first took place [22]

parmeesian – parmesan [23]

tatwrankled – a mess [24]

jams – arms or legs [25]

nunch – lunch (apropos a mispronunciation) [26]

quallum – a jerk [27]

ozee-chicken – this feels stressful, but it’ll be OK [28]

yeet – broadly, to throw; emphasises forcefulness and a lack of concern for the thing being thrown; an expression of excitement, happiness or nervousness, sometimes accompanied by a dance move; I yeet, I was yeeting, I yote, I have yought, I will yeet, I will have thought [29]

About

Johan Emerson Grobler has been editing academic and related work since 2007.

When he edits, he?takes responsibility for the text, as if he were the co-author. Most of what he does is a blend of copyediting, line editing and proofreading. That is, he assembles words into hard-working sentences that can be inhaled like ice cream.

A great edit?can be the difference between approval or rejection, resources allocated or denied, a sale or no sale, and a cum laude or a summa cum laude.?

A member of Professional Editors’ Guild (member number GRO 007), Johan has?assisted authors to successfully submit papers to at least 78 journals.?

Sources

Tom Ough: Why every family has its own ‘familect’ – the secret language we only use at home. 19 May 2021.

Connie Chang: Why your family’s secret language is good for kids. 18 October 2021.

Anne Helen Petersen: The familect of Culture Study. 16 May 2021.

Pisana Ferrari: The case of ‘familects’. 17 September 2021.

Sarah Cottrell: My kids think I’m a nerd because I’m still trying to figure out what ‘yeet’ means.

Familect phrases – credits

1. Petersen. 2. Credited to [hereafter: c.t.] the Guillain family of Oxfordshire, Ough. 3. C.t. the Hartley family of the South-East by Julien, Ough. 4, 5. C.t. the Sturges family in Devon, Ough. 6, 7. No credit, Ough. 8. C.t. Trevor McDonald, Ough. 9. C.t. to Rick Wakeman, Ough. 10, 11, 12. C.t. a Twitter follower of Nigella Lawson, Ough. 13. C.t. Olivia Wood, Ough. 14, 15, 16. C.t. Poppie Platt, Ough. 17. C.t. UKbyBoat/@EnglandByBoat’s grandfather, Ough. 18. C.t. Patrick Gray’s grandmother, Ough. 19. C.t. Anne Rea, Ough. 20. C.t. Laura Friedman Williams, Ough. 21. C.t. Jenny Colgan, Ough. 22. C.t. Ed Cumming, Ough. 23, 24, 25. C.t. Giulia Crouch, Ough. 26, 27, 28. C.t. Louise Gleason’s Cantonese mother, Chang. 29. Multiple sources.