Spoochies on the couch-a-field! What ‘familect’ does your household use?
Posted May 20, 2021 11:59 am.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Have you ever noticed many families have words or terms only they understand? It’s something dubbed the “familect” — or family dialect.
It’s being celebrated by the Telegraph, which has spoken to language experts who suggest it’s like linguistic glue that helps hold a family together. It’s almost a comfort language that reflects its history.
The “familect” consists of those inside jokes and deliberately mispronounced words that make your household conversations unique.
Listen: NEWS 1130’s Mike Lloyd is On the Offbeat, telling us about the “familect”:
The Sturges family has “several words based on gross dog behaviour” in its familect, including the coinage of “yachting” (the act of a dog dragging its undercarriage across the floor in order to relieve an itch).
????For the Guillain family of Oxfordshire, the musty water left in a reusable bottle has a name: “Horse water.”
Charlotte Guillain, a writer of children’s books, has no idea how the name arose, “but it makes total sense to us”
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 20, 2021
The Telegraph twitter account is littered with other people’s examples, including the family that digs into its “spoochies” for breakfast (that’s scrambled eggs, if you’re not part of the Grant clan.)
Its understood in my household that scrambled eggs are called "spoochies"
— Michael Grant (@mwdurden) May 20, 2021
Others offered without definition: “couch-a-field,” “frikafrator,” “nabood,” “memu,” and “ppbubba.”
Language experts say the familect is actually important, calling it “the talk of our tribe, our history, our comfort language.”
