What did you say?

Grandad's Loblob car

“Butinski?” said Mike.

“What?” I said. Mike was doing what he always does at breakfast besides eating his very healthy meal of bran flakes, banana and raisins. He was trying to solve the puzzle on his daily MENSA calendar. Usually he can do these puzzles quite easily on his own and I only get called into adding my wise(?) thoughts if he is stuck. Not of course if the puzzle has to do with numbers or math. I'm useless at those.

” Any other clues?” I said.

“Well MENSA says it's a common uncapitalized English word.”

Now I'm the reader of the family so usually I know many obscure words or at least can hazard a guess at what they might mean. “Sounds like a Polish thing to me ...maybe a general” I said. “Or on second thoughts, maybe a person that invented something scientific.”

I left him to ponder the answer and went out to do my daily walk. While I walked, I let my mind ramble about strange and different kinds of words. I glanced down at my walking shoes. I really need to get a new pair. The shoes I call walking shoes are I think often called sport shoes these days. I can remember a while back when the term for them was running shoes. I know some people called them trainers and some called them pumps. Maybe today the kids call them by the brand name, Nike or Adidas or whatever is in fashion now.

When I came over from England and taught in Montreal, I faced a first grade class that looked like the offspring of the United Nations. There were English and French Canadians, English, Scottish, Irish, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian and West Indian children facing me. I am sure all those children's mothers called running shoes something different as well but in my class they were refered to as “plimsolls” because that is what I knew them as at that time.

Wysiwig

A while back when I was first learning about computers, I adopted two darling kittens and we were trying to think of neat names for them both. Have you noticed that a lot of new words come about because of computer use? Well our kittens became Pixel, because his coat had many blended colors and a Wysiwig because “what you see is what you get".

Friend is another word which is definitely being changed because of the internet. Now it's a verb, “May I friend you?" still sounds strange to me. Still on the whole I like the inventiveness of the new computer words.  Mike tells me some people have a dongle on their computer. Well I haven't found it yet. Widget I like as well. Not sure what it is but it sounds like it would be helpful. Can't be that long before some of these new words become part of the official English Dictionary

Pixel

Kids invent words all the time and they become part of the individual family's vocabulary. When TIB was a baby and he saw an commercial on TV that featured slow motion photography of the kind where two lovers are running together through a beautiful meadow that became “soft running”. Very descriptive. I think "anbulince" came from him and we still use it today.

Half the fun of hearing toddlers learning to talk is the way they make up great new words to make their point. RMB always refered to Grandad's car as a loblob car, short for Ford Popular Prefect car. 

I remember there was radio program on the BBC eons ago and one of the characters was a small child ,Horace, who talked in baby talk which only certain people could understand and the catch phrase from the show was “ What did Horace say?” Well that became standard in our family for all kinds of situations when we encountered someone we couldn't understand or who talked in gobbledegook.

One of the old & famous comediens Stanley Unwin became a great star by using made up words to perform in a language that is both clever and hilarious. Check out his videos at Youtube. They are hilarious.

Probably the best known nonsense words that strangely enough made sense are the well known words of the poem by Lewis Carrol. He was a master of strange and unique words and very  peculiar stories if you think Of “Alice in Wonderland”

                                         Jabberwocky

'TWAS brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Check out the link for further verses http://theotherpages.org/poems/carrol01.html.

By the way, we had to look up the word butinsky on the web and found out that it was American slang for One who is prone to butt in, interrupt, or get involved where (s)he is not welcome.

Hardly a common English word MENSA!