A few entries in our family glossary
Jul. 8th, 2008 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantDoesn't everyone have words and phrases that only have meaning in their own families? I want to hear yours, too!
Walter: Sad, but not with ordinary sadness -- with that voluptuous melancholy that you can sink down into and enjoy.
For a Spanish class, the spouse was reading the poetry of Lorca in Spanish, and he read me "The Ballad of the Water of the Seas" (there's a not-great translation here). The poem has a repeating refrain of "the water of the seas" (el agua de los mares), and the last stanza says, more or less: "And you, my heart, where was your deep bitterness born?" "Bitter, very bitter is the water of the seas." So we would go around saying, "Bitter, very bitter."
Well, of course "de los mares" makes you think of Walter De La Mare, who was melancholy his own self. So eventually we wound up saying, with mock solemnity, "Walter, very Walter."
Boorstinian: It seems trivial, but if you examine it closely, it turns out to tell a whole larger story.
We read Daniel Boorstin's three-volume American history together (back when we had neither offspring nor computers to occupy our time). Boorstin will do an entire chapter on, say, glass windows. You'll go, "How could he possibly have thirty pages on glass windows?" But by the time you're done, glass windows will have been used to demonstrate import/export patterns, technological development, economics, and attitudes toward shelter.
So say you're in a mall, surrounded by the same slick, identical chain stores you see in every mall, and suddenly you come upon a little tiny shoe-repair shop crammed into a corner, and all the words on the outside are in some other language, so you can only tell it's a shoe-repair shop because of the drawing of the broken-down shoe. And one of you will say, "I wonder how long that's been here," and the other will say, "I'll bet it's Boorstinian."
Peel me a grape: I feel guilty for making you work while I just lie around, but while you're up ... I was an adult before I realized my mother had gotten that one from a song.
You're gooder'n ary angel: Thank you. Another from Mom, who probably got it from her farmer parents.
How I hate waffle night: May mean: The person in question is a mean-spirited person who can't stand other people's harmless pleasures. Or may mean: This harmless thing that you take such innocent pleasure in? It's driving me insane.
My ex-boss, the Space Alien, ate, as near as I can tell, nothing. She seemed to take no pleasure in food, and, indeed, to view it rather the way some old religious writers viewed marital sex, as a disgusting necessity.
Well, the Space Alien lived with a boyfriend who loved kitchen gadgets, and one year he got a waffle maker for Christmas.
"I can always tell when it's going to be a waffle night," she said, "because sometime after dinner he'll start humming. Oh, no, I'll think. We'll go to bed the way we always do, and in the night when I'm almost asleep, he'll get up and go down to the kitchen, humming. And then the smell will waft up the stairs, and I'll know he's down there eating waffles at midnight. How I hate waffle night."
Mostly I say it when the spouse enters his second hour of piano practice.
A tricky, crafty x: This one is hard to explain, but it made me laugh out loud in the car when I thought of it, so I'll do my best: The spouse used to lean over the basinet that the baby was in and say, "That one's up to something. What a tricky, crafty baby."
Eventually he explained that it was funny to him because obviously there is nothing less tricky and crafty than a baby, but the thing is, the kidlet did have a mischievous expression as a baby; they did look like they were up to something. So the phrase means, at the same time, someone who's perfectly, completely innocent, and someone who actually is up to something. As in: "Mr. Green gives me such difficult pieces to play." "Well, he's up to something. He's a tricky, crafty piano teacher."
You don't have to label all those rocks today: Means, more or less: This project you're driving yourself insane over? You think it's a tedious necessity, but it's not a necessity at all but an obsessive compulsion.
The spouse's entire family is prone to this sort of thing. (I have dark theories as to why this is. There are three siblings, and the spouse is the only one who's not addicted to anything.) His brother is the worst, though, possibly because his drug of choice is a stimulant rather than a depressant.
He had a rock collection. I think he may have had one rock from every important place he'd ever visited. Hundreds of them. And he called the spouse one night and said, "I spent weeks building a cabinet with a little compartment for each rock, and then I was up until midnight putting labels on each cabinet, and suddenly it occurred to me ..."
At this point, the spouse is thinking, "He's finally going to figure out that this is a fool's errand that does no one any good and is causing him lots of stress and effort for nothing!"
But no. What the brother-in-law says is, "It occurred to me: I can do the rest of it later! I don't have to label all these rocks today!"
(In its spectacular missing-of-the-point, this is not unlike that commercial for the smoker's toothpaste that used to be on television in the seventies -- does anyone remember that? The guy would take a puff of a cigarette, then exhale through a handkerchief and show the black stain that resulted. He'd say, "Can you imagine what all that smoke is doing to your teeth?" And all of us would yell, "Your lungs, you idiot!")
When we make verbs out of our last names, the spouse's verb sometimes means becoming obsessed with some pointless exercise in order to stave off some nameless doom, and sometimes it means taking weird joy in adding up enormous numbers, often to demonstrate how inevitable the nameless doom is. I'm not going to share the names, so let's just say one is "spousing" if one collects twenty bottles of drinking water in the basement just in case the bird flu shuts down all the stores in town, and one is also spousing if one says, "They say bird flu could spread at a geometric rate. So say one person gets it, and she gives it to four other people, and those four give it to four apiece, that's sixteen, and then those sixteen ..."
One is Resing, on the other hand, when one is making pedantic corrections. "You forgot the original one -- that's seventeen."
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns
Walter: Sad, but not with ordinary sadness -- with that voluptuous melancholy that you can sink down into and enjoy.
For a Spanish class, the spouse was reading the poetry of Lorca in Spanish, and he read me "The Ballad of the Water of the Seas" (there's a not-great translation here). The poem has a repeating refrain of "the water of the seas" (el agua de los mares), and the last stanza says, more or less: "And you, my heart, where was your deep bitterness born?" "Bitter, very bitter is the water of the seas." So we would go around saying, "Bitter, very bitter."
Well, of course "de los mares" makes you think of Walter De La Mare, who was melancholy his own self. So eventually we wound up saying, with mock solemnity, "Walter, very Walter."
Boorstinian: It seems trivial, but if you examine it closely, it turns out to tell a whole larger story.
We read Daniel Boorstin's three-volume American history together (back when we had neither offspring nor computers to occupy our time). Boorstin will do an entire chapter on, say, glass windows. You'll go, "How could he possibly have thirty pages on glass windows?" But by the time you're done, glass windows will have been used to demonstrate import/export patterns, technological development, economics, and attitudes toward shelter.
So say you're in a mall, surrounded by the same slick, identical chain stores you see in every mall, and suddenly you come upon a little tiny shoe-repair shop crammed into a corner, and all the words on the outside are in some other language, so you can only tell it's a shoe-repair shop because of the drawing of the broken-down shoe. And one of you will say, "I wonder how long that's been here," and the other will say, "I'll bet it's Boorstinian."
Peel me a grape: I feel guilty for making you work while I just lie around, but while you're up ... I was an adult before I realized my mother had gotten that one from a song.
You're gooder'n ary angel: Thank you. Another from Mom, who probably got it from her farmer parents.
How I hate waffle night: May mean: The person in question is a mean-spirited person who can't stand other people's harmless pleasures. Or may mean: This harmless thing that you take such innocent pleasure in? It's driving me insane.
My ex-boss, the Space Alien, ate, as near as I can tell, nothing. She seemed to take no pleasure in food, and, indeed, to view it rather the way some old religious writers viewed marital sex, as a disgusting necessity.
Well, the Space Alien lived with a boyfriend who loved kitchen gadgets, and one year he got a waffle maker for Christmas.
"I can always tell when it's going to be a waffle night," she said, "because sometime after dinner he'll start humming. Oh, no, I'll think. We'll go to bed the way we always do, and in the night when I'm almost asleep, he'll get up and go down to the kitchen, humming. And then the smell will waft up the stairs, and I'll know he's down there eating waffles at midnight. How I hate waffle night."
Mostly I say it when the spouse enters his second hour of piano practice.
A tricky, crafty x: This one is hard to explain, but it made me laugh out loud in the car when I thought of it, so I'll do my best: The spouse used to lean over the basinet that the baby was in and say, "That one's up to something. What a tricky, crafty baby."
Eventually he explained that it was funny to him because obviously there is nothing less tricky and crafty than a baby, but the thing is, the kidlet did have a mischievous expression as a baby; they did look like they were up to something. So the phrase means, at the same time, someone who's perfectly, completely innocent, and someone who actually is up to something. As in: "Mr. Green gives me such difficult pieces to play." "Well, he's up to something. He's a tricky, crafty piano teacher."
You don't have to label all those rocks today: Means, more or less: This project you're driving yourself insane over? You think it's a tedious necessity, but it's not a necessity at all but an obsessive compulsion.
The spouse's entire family is prone to this sort of thing. (I have dark theories as to why this is. There are three siblings, and the spouse is the only one who's not addicted to anything.) His brother is the worst, though, possibly because his drug of choice is a stimulant rather than a depressant.
He had a rock collection. I think he may have had one rock from every important place he'd ever visited. Hundreds of them. And he called the spouse one night and said, "I spent weeks building a cabinet with a little compartment for each rock, and then I was up until midnight putting labels on each cabinet, and suddenly it occurred to me ..."
At this point, the spouse is thinking, "He's finally going to figure out that this is a fool's errand that does no one any good and is causing him lots of stress and effort for nothing!"
But no. What the brother-in-law says is, "It occurred to me: I can do the rest of it later! I don't have to label all these rocks today!"
(In its spectacular missing-of-the-point, this is not unlike that commercial for the smoker's toothpaste that used to be on television in the seventies -- does anyone remember that? The guy would take a puff of a cigarette, then exhale through a handkerchief and show the black stain that resulted. He'd say, "Can you imagine what all that smoke is doing to your teeth?" And all of us would yell, "Your lungs, you idiot!")
When we make verbs out of our last names, the spouse's verb sometimes means becoming obsessed with some pointless exercise in order to stave off some nameless doom, and sometimes it means taking weird joy in adding up enormous numbers, often to demonstrate how inevitable the nameless doom is. I'm not going to share the names, so let's just say one is "spousing" if one collects twenty bottles of drinking water in the basement just in case the bird flu shuts down all the stores in town, and one is also spousing if one says, "They say bird flu could spread at a geometric rate. So say one person gets it, and she gives it to four other people, and those four give it to four apiece, that's sixteen, and then those sixteen ..."
One is Resing, on the other hand, when one is making pedantic corrections. "You forgot the original one -- that's seventeen."
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 7/9/08 02:38 pm (UTC)I'd love to steal "In short, what do you have?" but it's totally context-dependent; I'd just get stared at.