Ghost poop, husband-in-law, and other "family words"

[Wilson Gray]

Does Dickinson include words for the genitalia, the anus, female
breasts, excrement, and other less-openly discussed subjects? These
are the things that are most likely to have names peculiar to a
family. In my family, for example, excrement was known as "bowels."
This caused me some problems when I later came across phrases such as
"in the bowels of the earth." OTOH, we had no name for what I later
came to know as "house moss" (I read it somewhere). We knew it simply
as "the dust under the bed(s)."

-Wilson

On 7/18/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Ghost poop, husband-in-law, and other "family words"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Nathan Bierma's Tribune column this week is about Paul Dickson's new
> book, _Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families_:
>
> -----
> http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0717languagejul17,1,3877205.story
> Families seldom set out to coin their own code words and catchphrases,
> Dickson says. "They just pop out of the fabric of a family or a small
> group of people," he writes in his introduction. "They can't be forced
> because they work to fill a gap -- a place where there is no real word
> or the real word doesn't work."
> Dickson lists as his sources the names of people who shared their
> family's words and radio stations on which he has appeared and
> collected words from listeners.
> -----
>
> Bierma goes on to list a number of the words and phrases in Dickson's
> book. Several are not specific to any single family (though the
> families involved might think so), such as "ghost poop" for "foam
> peanuts or dustbunnies." Another one is "husband-in-law," defined as
> "an ex-wife's new husband." The late George Harrison often referred to
> Eric Clapton as his husband-in-law after Clapton married Harrison's
> ex-wife Pattie Boyd.
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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