A recent article from the Style section reports:
The word for a TV remote is marote; for chicken, it’s chimpken, and for the Aperol Spritz cocktail it’s app-a-ball spitz-ee. Shrimp is swimps, hair ties are hair gigglies and Starbucks is Starbonks.
All of these are examples of so-called marriage language, the weird and oftentimes embarrassing dialects people in long-term relationships develop to communicate with their partners.
It’s typically a mishmash of inside jokes (giving friends and family members nicknames) and purposeful malapropisms (slipping up and mispronouncing bird as birb), plus faux abbreviations (a shower is a show show, spinach becomes spinch) and code words for cruder terms (every couple seems to have their own word for passing gas).
Does your family or group of friends have its own language — made-up words, abbreviations, codes or nicknames that only you know and use with one another? If so, tell us about one of those terms and how it came to be.
Why do you think we tend to communicate in this unique way with the people close to us? What does it mean to you to have a special language with your friends or family?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about “marriage language.”
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
