During the pandemic, we’ve spent dramatically more time in those quarters, and our in-group slang has changed accordingly.Ĭynthia Gordon, an associate linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family, has spent much of her working life in the strange land of family discourse. Sometimes known as familects, these invented words, pet names, in-jokes, and personal memes swirl and emerge from the mess of lives spent in close quarters.
Maybe you have an old joke or a shared reference to a song. Perhaps you have a nickname from a parent that followed you into adulthood. Many of us have a secret language, the private lexicon of our home life. Now, more than a decade later, that slipup is immortalized as our own peculiar greeting to each other twice a year. My younger self nervously bungled through new vocabulary-The numbers! The animals! The months!-to wish him “iki domuz” instead of “happy birthday” ( İyi ki doğdun) while we drank like pigs in his tiny apartment outside of UCLA. Long ago, I took my first steps into adult language lessons and tried to impress my Turkish American boyfriend on his special day. Well, that last one is actually quite normal in our house. Many things were weird about it: opening presents on Zoom, my phone’s insistent photo reminders from “one year ago today” that could be mistaken for last month, my partner brightly wishing me “ iki domuz,” a Turkish phrase that literally means “two pigs.” I celebrated my second pandemic birthday recently.
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