In a conversation with my wife today, this came up. Does anyone out there ever occasionally use certain words within family conversations, which are corruptions of words your kids tried to say when they were first learning to talk? They certainly bring back memories for us. In reverse chronological order, For two identical items, our grandson would say they were "The same, the same." For disappeared he'd say "de-appeared." Our daughter as a toddler, couldn't at first manage the word Yellow, it was always "lello" (My wife had just said she fancied some "lello shoes," that colour is "in" ...again!) Our youngest son could only manage "wimwipers," for those on the front of the car windscreen. and in the days when the milkman delivered to the door with cries of, "Milko!" he was described by our eldest son at the time as "The gookoo man." Digessing a bit. The building in the garden which that houses my garden tools and our back-up freezers, I orginally built fo our seven year-old daughter more than forty years ago,for her pets, we still call, "The rabbit shed."
My youngest daughter Maria couldn't pronounce the name of my eldest Michele and would call her Miggy, this was/is the name she is known by even to this day.
My brother is called Matthew. When we were wee his best friend couldn't pronounce his name so we tried to teach him to call him Matty but he couldn't say that either... it came out as Bassey and we all call him Bassey to this day! My sister pronounces umbrella as 'rumbrella'
My brother when he was very young called breakfast cereals, "puffies". It's such a descriptive name and it's stayed. To this day we all know what puffies are.
Our daughter from the age of five, we called "Lizzy-drip," I thought it was after the name of a kid's TV programme she liked. But my wife says we called her that a couple of years before the programme had been shown. We still call her that occasionally, despite the fact that she was 50 last year. In her teens, her friend Alison, who smoked (none of our family did) but the fact was unknown to her parents. We christened her "cigarette-ash Lil." More to discourage her from the habit, she didn't mind. I've a photo somewhere of her I took, I'd been down to my koi filter room where I had some in the quarantine tank, to take some photos. We didn't allow anyone to smoke in our house. So as I came out of the room and turned to go back to the house, I saw that Alison who was visiting, had climbed out of our daughter's bedroom window and was standing on the flat roof of our lounge extension, holding an umbrella as it was raining. She was having a, "cigarette break." We shortened her nick-name to "Lil," a name to which she would answer. Her mother once asked me; "Why do you all called her Lil?" I shrugged off the question.
My niece was almost three and we were walking down the road, in November, and she looked at a very large oak tree and asked if it was a gunpowder tree. We had to be careful with asking what she meant and she said that she thought it was the one in the poem she had been hearing:- Please to remember the 5th of November Gunpowder trees and plot
