My family has a pretty distinct way of speaking and communicating, especially the kids. We all have similar inflections in our voice patterns, and we also have our own little grammatical system. I think the older kids (me, V, and A) picked up on silly grammatical things that the younger siblings did when they were smaller, which eventually developed into the S family language. My sister L, the youngest child, continues to influence the family language inflections with her little nasal-ey voice. We also continue to add her little phrases into the family vocabulary, although we have resisted to include L's difficulty with irregular past participles into the family grammatical system.
We have many different aspects to our family language. It is common to speak with a hyperbolic/superlative-y twist, adding "the most ever" or "the bestest ever" to a sentence. One distinct characteristic of the S family grammar is the use of the pronoun "it." Really, "it" doesn't quite function as a pronoun, because it is used in sentences that also include the noun which "it" as a pronoun is supposed to replace. For example, if we were speaking normal English and wanted to discuss how much we love a toy, we could say, "We love it" (with "it" meaning the toy). However, in S-ian grammar, we would also have to include "the toy" in the sentence: "We love it the toy."
"We love it the dog."
"We love it our house."
"We love it the car."
If you want to be especially clever, you can actually use "it" in the proper English fashion, but also include a S-ian "it" in the sentence:
"We love it it."
(Obviously, this second "it" can refer to anything - you have to contextually deduce what we are talking about - aren't we sneaky!)
The S family "it" also has another variation, "itch." So, one can say, "I love itch the dog." Or, one can ask, "Did you love itch the movie?"
Ah, family silliness. It's great. Our vocabulary also has been influenced by younger children over the years. "Li-berry" = library. "Jennifer Conference" = General Conference. "Sam-witch" = sandwich.
What about you and your family? Do you have distinct vocabulary or grammatical structures that would require explanation to an outsider?
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8 comments:
Huh. As a member of your extended family, I've always been charmed by the more silly S-isms. Particularly the sibilant S you guys use in many words, particularly if those words are fairly vowelly. (Yeeee-essss.)
My family? Here are a couple you might recognize: "Heavens!" and "Brother!" precede anything shocking, overly ordinary, overly ridiculous, or just as punctuation between thoughts.
That and talking like your grandmother. I have a very funny holiday memory of my sisters and I all doing our impersonations of her in regular conversation, but not being able to complete a thought because we were laughing so hard.
I love it your post because I've often thought about doing some research on how older family members will pick up on and adapt the quirks of the younger family members speech. But then I wondered if it was only done among our group of friends/family.
T-rav and I are especially fond of mispronouncing words on purpose (in whatever language comes to mind), which is quite amusing to us, but for some reason native speakers of the language never seem to get it.
I was going to add something and then forgot. What I think is as noteworthy as your linguistic familial tics are the facial ones which accompany them. Like the classic bulging of S-eyes before making a pronouncement, cute or otherwise. I can picture every (female) member of your family pressing their lips together and emphasizing a pronouncement with that slightly intense stare. although it seems like A & C the younger, though, usually blink as if they are tooo tooo bored to put any effort into their pronouncements.
Sorry. Not meaning to hijack your comments, just thinking about this.
Ha! Aunt B, the open eyes and the "Yeeeee-ssss" or "Greee-aaaat" pronunciations are very S-esque. Good call! I actually thought about including them in the post but then I forgot.
You know my family too well. :) I think we bulge our eyes and nod our heads more while speaking either with people we know very well, or people we don't know at all (and with whom we are engaged in awkward conversation). Perhaps casual acquaintances get less of the S family effect? Hmm.
Most of the "grammatical" errors in my family are actually pronunciation errors. For much of my teenage life I was convinced that my father was the inspiration for the character Archie Bunker on All in the Family. My parents are both famous for saying things that sound very close to the actual word, but are in fact not a word at all. Examples: "Anaplastic shock" instead of Anaphylactic shock or "bumfundled" instead of befuddled. There are plenty more examples, but this will give you an idea of what I am up against.
Great post.
I actually don't speak like my family much at all. They all tend to be very simplistic in nature and I tend to be long winded (no way, right?) and I use a very "descriptive vocabulary" laced with big words that don't always fit the occasion.
I have noticed that there's a phrase I said once at work (and coworkers are kind of like family)that has now been picked up by my boss and every other 50-something employee in the city. It is, "I'm picking up what you're laying down." While it was funny at first, I now find myself troubled to hear government officials saying it. My oh my, what have I started . . .
The H's grammatical peculiarities don't come to mind, but the P's have a few. For one, the women will sometimes replace the pronoun subject followed by a predicate with an erroneously (and sometimes redundantly) pluralized object pronoun. Ex:
Hers is not happy.
Thems is good people
Other times a demonstrative is preceded by an article. This is often associated with an instruction. Ex:
Bring the that with you.
Did you mean the this or the those?
Still more bizarre is the predetermined metathesis present in the oral storytelling tradition of Ma P, which metathesis sometimes slips into colloquial speech. Ex:
This is the story of Rindercella who slopped her dripper. Afterwards we shall be favored with the tale of the Three Pittle Ligs and the Wig Bad Bolf who was hery vungry.
Consequently:
Without my lunch, I was hery vungry at work today.
By the way, I hope yous are having a tood gime in Seattle and that J enjoys it his job.
I also think the article + demonstraitve may have some derivation from biblical Hebrew i.e. hazzeh or hazzot
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