Family-isms

Every family has them, those silly mispronounced words that a child said once and it was so cute that the whole family keeps on mispronouncing it that way for years. Sometimes the family just incorporates the new word so completely into their vocabulary, that it doesn't dawn on the children that something isn't right until they get to school and are teased mercilessly by their peers. Years later the family-ism will pop up at embarrassing moments for the child who originated the word.

For example, quite a few English speaking families say b'sketti for spaghetti because a toddler couldn't get his mouth around the word.

Here are a few of our family's family-isms:

Mecidin= medicine
The origin of this family-ism goes back to the 60's when I, and my sisters were very small.

Ambleance=ambulance
The origin of this one is probably Ian in the early 80's

Al Pacino coffee = cappuccino coffee
A Sean family-ism dating from 1992 and an early morning in London and we popped into a cafe for breakfast before hitting the museums. Sean was reading the menu and said excitedly, "Oh, they have Al Pacino coffee!".

gift vulture = gift voucher
Another classic one from Sean circa 1992 when he got book tokens from his primary school for winning something in English class.

mix-ited=excited
A brilliant family-ism from my niece Annie who used to get mixited in place of excited.

consploded=exploded
A George original. Wouldn't you rather consplode things instead of seeing them exploded?

If you would like to submit one of your favourite family-isms, I'll post it here.

From J-Funk: My friend Uncle KT is actually a girl whose nephew keeps calling her
'Uncle KT' for some reason - the name stuck and now she has that as her
blog name - there's a link to her on my blog.

From Cousin Helen: When Andrew was a toddler he made the "s" sound of "snow" by breathing through his nose. Also, he and his cousin Aaron could not pronounce "elephant." One said "odden" and the other said "onkenkonk."
- Helen