My family's linguistic adventures

My sister in particular has a few funny pronunciations and personal arrangements of words she loves. Recently she and her husband were discussing how minimizing clutter and downsizing their house was a Pyrrhic victory - she said it to me on the phone as “Fee-rick victory”, I corrected her and she said “You know, that reminds me of a time when someone was talking about Pyrrhic victory and I went, ‘Uh huh, yeah freaky victory’ and moved on. It was 15 years ago.”

When we were young, we were huge fans of Text Twist on Yahoo Games (I will not link, it is a time black hole) - that game has a way of messing with your ability to read. The letters we had up were B A N L E U. Time ran out before we could get the six-letter word. My mom, my sister and I were locked expectantly on the screen - U N A B L E. My sister: “Oo na bley? What the fuck is oo na bley.”

To this day, my sister has a special relationship to the word “açaí”, she prounces it “akai”. Similarly she doesn’t care much about the difference between “aesthetic” and “ascetic”. There’s a minimalist joke in there. Ba dum tss.

We used to make fun of my dad’s adventures as well, and my sister did it so much she got stuck with a few things she used to make fun of dad about - like calling a futon a fulton.

My dad on the other hand loves his acronyms, and I don’t just mean abbreviations, no, full on pronounceable acronyms. One of them has become a recurrent family password, so I will not repeat it here (it is not PASWARD). He also likes to combine languages as he sees fit, putting ketchup on his dosa as it were (oh god, I can’t believe I just said that, I am so sorry for that mental image). His most iconic acronym, his magnum opus is HASALE, MOTE CHAI. Hardware and software are logically equivalent, modern tendencies in control are hardware independent. It also roughly translates to English as “Hey brother-in-law (rude way of saying it), bring me a chai.”

My mom also has a soft spot for cross-linguistic jokes. The Telugu word for burn/shoot sounds similar to call, and given how we code switch, one always has two language modules running, especially with compound verbs. “Call chesthanu” (I will call you) and “Kaal chesthanu” (I will burn you) sound very similar, and it makes my mom giggle every time. Similarly, the Telugu word for tomorrow is “ray-pu”, which sounds like…well listen, just…don’t tell people you’ll be doing things tomorrow.

We’ve also inherited a few assorted phrases from relatives - a perennial favorite being “Whose whose theirs theirs”. My aunt was out to a lunch with a few people and one of the gentlemen wanted to make it very clear that he wanted separate checks, but his English wasn’t that strong. He very emphatically insisted and pointed to each person’s meal - “Whose whose theirs theirs”.

The language nerd in me loves the echo word formation found in many Indian languages and historical place names. It seems to be a South Indian feature imported into North Indian languages as well. I just love how much archaeology you can do by just getting curious about the words we use every day.