It all started with Grandma.
What started with Grandma?
We call it “Family Speak.” She read an article about it many years ago. Finally, a verifiable piece of journalism documenting the bizarre dialect of my childhood household that was fundamentally English, but in many ways more an amalgamation of Pennsylvania Dutch, German, Polish and toddler mispronunciations collected from my youth and that of my cousins.
It’s a bit of an interesting quirk about my family that I didn’t really notice until I got married and joined another family and found out no one regularly uses baby vocabulary… except babies. Yes, the Fucillo Family has “kai-kai” which means fall and must be derived from Portugese, as I know “to fall” in Spanish is caer (pronounced kai-air). Looks like “to fall” in Portuguese is in fact cair. And they say “beaucoup bucks.” Other than that, I’m not sure the rest of the vocab James has brought to the party, such as “greenhorns” and “oakies,” qualifies? When I google them, I mostly get the Urban Dictionary. And Atwater is definitely not urban…
Possibly the most interesting quirk is that James learned how to speak my family’s language in very short order. He’s completely fluent. In almost no time he was making ossie and fetching my gritchel and eating grum and nanvees. (That would be making coffee and fetching my purse and eating bean skabetty (as Nate calls it) and bananas.) My cousin Bryan knows less about what he used to say as a toddler than my very own husband. How weird is that? I’m going to have to make a concerted effort to get some sort of dictionary going– adding our many new vocabulary words such as Neckflix and sunscream.
Tonight the boys and I negotiated some sort of rare TV show swap in place of story time. In my usual fashion I declared, “And when this ONE show is over, you’re going to turn it off and go brush your teeth, right? No complaining or crying or imploring me for one more?” And Nate says, “Pinky square, Mom. Pinky square.” We shake pinkies to lock-in very important promises.
One of my favorites was on Wednesday on our way home from school. The boys and I were talking about twins because one of our most favorite teachers, Miss Amy, is pregnant with twins. I was explaining the difference between fraternal twins and identical twins and the boys were excitedly thinking about the possibility of a boy and a girl twin. We talked about how you have to have two different eggs for fraternal twins versus one egg that splits into two for identical twins. As we’re discussing Miss Amy and what she might have, I say, “She could have two boys or two girls, or maybe a boy and a girl.”
And Nate says, “I hope it’s a boy and a girl. But that’s not a tentacle.”
He was following perfectly… Nate’s no greenhorn.