today it's the floppy flippy, tomorrow it's the flippy floppy, and this sounds like a kids' song

[cimorene]

When, as an individual person, you say stuff a certain weird way that nobody else does, that's called an "idiolect", right?

So what's it called when a family unit has some slang or jargon or whatever... terms that are unique to them?

When I was a kid my dad's eccentric fannish poet friend Geoff Huth wrote up a whole book of them from his family that he shared with their connections, and we were pretty impressed, having a fair number in our own (that is, my childhood nuclear family's) circle, but not nearly as many.

IMO my dad's best coinage is "pice", an endearment/form of address that he and my mom would both use to address each other, as "the singular of spouse". (I think it started as 'spice' and evolved into 'pice'?)

Since my wife tragically works a service job with randomly variable hours that are never predictable until she gets her schedule a couple of weeks in advance, she eventually coined the term "the flip-flop" (which then evolved into "the flippy floppy") for an evening when she's worked a late shift and has very little time before going to bed because she has to work an early morning shift the next day (the minimum difference is 9 pm-7 am).

Eventually, we realized that we needed a term for the inverse of this, a work night with extra free time because she's already worked an early shift and has a late shift the next day: "the floppy flippy".

The fact that these terms sound extremely undignified is either a bonus or a detriment, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

#language #idiolect #dad jokes #service industry

Comments

[niqaeli]

I dunno if there is a term; I'd probably still call it idiolect, since it pretty much is just writ a little larger.

Also, huh, re: your parents. I've seen spice before, but... as a plural? Spouse being already singular, and spice being modeled off of mouse/mice.

[cimorene]

Yeah, that's why I tagged it dad joke! Though perhaps I should have said something like 'alternate singular'. It's very typical of his idea of humor. And then over time it becomes funny to other people just through his amazingly dogged repetition...

[hebethen]

Going off "parricide", maybe "parrilect"? :|a

[cimorene]

People might be able to guess it with that one! Although they might also guess beards.

But I mean the latin root is just like 'familia' which... doesn't make any very elegant words, so...

[hebethen]

Yeah, "familect" just sounds like, idk, an insurance brand...

[pearwaldorf]

There is an actual (if incredibly inelegant) term for doing the late then early shift: "clopening".

But I have never heard a term for the slack time between. That's kind of brilliant <3

[cimorene]

We don't use flippy-floppy and floppy-flippy strictly for free time... it refers more to the whole phenomenon, eg "Today is the flippy floppy" or "I've got the floppy flippy twice next week". But I suppose it's more oriented to the perspective of your free time (or rather what you have to do to your sleeping and eating schedule?) than the perspective of your work shifts like "clopening".

[megatheriid]

There is a word, though I think a rare one -- ecolect. Not sure where I came across it first, but it stuck with me. All households have some sort of ecolect, though not all to the same extent, I imagine.

[cimorene]

Cool! That sounds workable... and it also sounds like it could refer to any immediate environs, not just a household, potentially. I'll have to try and see if I can hunt it down.

[conuly]

The -lect morpheme has to do with speech as a whole, not to individual components thereof. A dialect is all the things that make up how people in a certain region speak, from grammar to vocabulary to pragmatics to pronunciation. An ethnolect is the same thing but for an ethnicity, a sociolect is the same thing but for a specified social group.

How you personally speak is your idiolect. It doesn't refer to specific weird things you say, it refers to the whole package, which is a mix of how people spoke where you grew up, how people speak where you live now, weird words that only your family/ethnic group/religious group/fandom/school use, things that you picked up from reading....

So, for example, my idiolect is largely == to NYC English with an overlay of Autistic Accent Syndrome... but it also has some influence from my father's Texan accent (notably, I have the pin/pen merger), a little bit of AAVE (despite not being black, I used stressed BEEN to indicate remote past (although I typically edit it out of my speech before actually speaking if it will create a nonstandard sentence), I use both the formal subjunctive and the word whom in casual speech.... All these things collectively form my idiolect.

If you need a term for the jargon spoken by a family, I'd probably just say "family jargon" unless for some reason it's quite divergent from the mainstream. This is because all possible combinations using -lect sound really ugly to my ear.

[cimorene]

An important and valuable distinction, thank you! But for ease of talking about individual speech quirks, 'idiolect' is still useful obviously, being in so many vocabularies already. And megatherlid offers "ecolect" for household variety, but they don't remember where they heard it.