Over in the NY Times Opinion section, there’s a weekend thread running about special family vocabularies — you know, the words that your household uses which might have some resemblance to the English [or Yiddish, or Spanish, or Italian] language, but really mean something very specific in your home’s argot — in my family some notable ones have been:
Happy Cow Milk — milk from an organic dairy that really does taste better, and comes in glass bottles
Murfle — what you say when you are depressed and feeling too awful to really contribute to a conversation, but you want to participate somehow
Kittenny — something worthy of being cossetted and protected, because it is soft, cuddly, and kitten-like
Doing a Wisconsin — trying to get from one room to the next using an inadequate scrap of towel or clothing to cover ones nakedness
When I was growing up, I heard a lot about “Sam Hill”, although it was never clear what exactly he was doing, and “Mrs. Sew-and-Sew”, who I thought might be a seamstress, but who also seemed to be up to all sorts of things that often did not merit approval.
In my current life, I occassionally wonder if words like “reading” and “analysis” are specific to my tribe, because God knows I’ve got plenty of students who don’t seem to understand these activities in any way that overlaps with my uses of the terms…..
Rethorykal Questions 