14 Words Only One Family Uses, Like ‘Sneezybox’ for a Box of Tissues

We have one of those serving spoons with prongs (I think it’s called a pasta spoon). We call it a grabula.

I couldn’t remember the word “aquarium” when talking to my husband and I said “you know... the... the... fish museum.” Aquarium is now fish museum.

Eee-ing When my daughter was a baby, her “angry cry” sounded like Eeeeeeeeeeee. So phrases like “I’ll just phone the electricity company up and eee at them” started. We still say it now, nearly 20 years later.

Pighogging I won the duvet wars (for once) and my wife awoke to find that I had an unreasonable share of the duvet. Still half asleep, my wife was undecided whether to call me a pig or to tell me to stop hogging the duvet. It came out as “Stop pighogging”. The word fits so well that the act of taking more than your share of duvet/blankets etc is known as pighogging in our family.

My partner is fluent in English but it’s not his first language, so sometimes he forgets the word for something (“what is called that thing?”) One night he suddenly started frantically gesturing and pointing at something near me. I asked what he wanted and all he could come up with was ’Sneezybox!’

This will forever be the official name for a box of tissues.

When my daughter was around three or four, she came downstairs as we were sitting down to eat a dinner of steaks, salad and baked potatoes. The only things she saw on the table were the baked potatoes. Once she climbed up to her seat, she stated with the utmost confidence, “Oh, we’re having monkey eggs for dinner. Alright.”

Potatoes have been monkey eggs ever since.

We have a thing hanging outside that tells us the temperature, its name is Arthur.
Arthur Mometer.

There is a word for this kind of private vocabulary: a familect. Writing in The Guardian, Harriet Powney described familects as home dialects in which words are given private meanings. Linguist David Crystal called the family words collected for the book Kitchen Table Lingo “the tip of an unexplored linguistic iceberg.”

The same book asked a question every family with a sofa will understand: “What other language has 57 words for the TV remote control?”

Jamify (v) To change into pajamas.

From the word Pajamas (n) -> Jammies (slang) -> Jamify (verbify)

Let me jamify before I take over watching the baby

In fourth grade biology we were talking about different kinds of trees and how some produce fruit or nuts, teacher asked us to name some and had no idea what I was talking about when I raised my hand and said “Pampios.” Apparently it’s what my older brother called pistachios when he was a toddler and the name stuck in my family but I never got the memo for its proper name.

Growing up, we had a half wall off our main entrance. Separated the living room from the entrance. We’d put keys, wallets, gloves, tools, basically anything we had in hand when we came in down on top of this wall. We didn’t know what it was called. We all just called it, “The thing sticking out”.

“Have you seen my glasses?”
“Yeah, they’re on the thing sticking out.”

" I left your keys on the thing sticking out."

That name will be with me til I die...

In my house, a meat mallet is a “chicken hammer”.

Here’s the story of how it came about: I was cooking a grilled chicken and pasta dinner, and needed the meat mallet. It was on the other side of my dish drain, and my hands were very messy. My son was closer to the meat mallet, but I wasn’t sure if he’d know what I meant if I called it a meat mallet. But, it looks like a hammer and he’d seen me use it on chicken. I asked him to get me the chicken hammer, and we both had a good giggle about it as he got it for me.

After we stopped laughing, I did tell him the real term for it, but he just repeated “chicken hammer”. It’s stuck so well that my sister calls it the same thing.

In our family instead of saying can I ’have a taste’ or ’taste’ something, we say firch. Like, can I get a firch of that cake? Mind if I firch your salad, it looks good.

Blates, aka Bowl-plates. My family loves these for any kind of salad, stew, or one-pot meal. they’re roughly 10″ across, 2″ deep. We love them but can’t figure out what they’re supposed to be called, so they’re Blates forever.

Grandmama invented “jitsy-ma-jotsy”: when you mix peanut butter and jelly in a bowl to make a sandwich for each of your six kids. Now there are about 40 folks who would stand in line for a jitsy-ma-jotsy.

TV Boat named by my toddler daughter. She’s in her 20’s now, but it’s still “the boat”.