The writer David Foster Wallace wasn’t exactly shy about using arcane language, but his careerlong love of a few words stood out. Greebles, for instance. Those are bits of lint or shreds of wet paper — a sweaty kid in “The Pale King” dries himself off and finds “toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead.” Then there were the fantods or, worse, the howling fantods, a kind of profound heebie-jeebie dread: Wallace mentioned those often enough that a major reader website called itself Howling Fantods.
These words weren’t Wallace’s inventions. (“Fantods” is actually a 19th-century antique; it was used by Mark Twain.) They’re things that Sally Wallace, his English-professor mother, enjoyed saying — words that became part of the language of her family and, eventually, her son’s books. The title of his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” was her pet name for dietary fiber. The way a broad population of people speaks is a dialect, and the way a particular individual speaks is known as an idiolect, and somewhere in between is what linguists call a familylect or familect: the unique way a given family uses language.
Every family has one. A quick survey of my co-workers produced too many delightful examples to list. The price of eating too much junk food was a case of circus tummy. Whipped cream was shush, after the sound of the can. A dog was a woofnik (an epithet once used for Laika, the Soviet space-dog) and a cat a pitty pie. Instead of greebles there was phyrtche, pronounced “furch,” which meant “something small and unidentifiable that is stuck to a place where it shouldn’t be.” One family adopted a toddler’s way of asking for “Sesame Street” and started calling all television shaba; the habit became so embedded that their next child, years later, came home from day care feeling betrayed to have learned it wasn’t standard English. Another family indicates that something is frightening by saying want some coleslaw, based on the time a son was scared by a haunted hayride and tried to recite the Buddhist prayer kwan seum bosal. My in-laws use the adjective blammy to describe people who are always rushing heedlessly around having accidents and causing commotions. “I never liked Amelia Bedelia,” someone once said. “She’s just so blammy.”
The earliest academic use of the word “familylect” may have come from a researcher named Bent Sondergaard, in a 1991 paper about speech in multilingual homes. It was largely popularized, though, by Cynthia Gordon, a sociolinguist at Georgetown University and the author of the 2009 book “Making Meanings, Creating Family.” She used it, she told me, “in a broader way, to refer to the idea that every family has a sort of ‘private language.’” Her interest was sparked when she was a graduate student, reviewing recordings from different households for a research project; as she listened, she was struck by “how each family was its own world of language.” Some of that language filled practical needs. But it was also a way of creating and reinforcing intimate bonds. “Social groups, including families, are not just something that’s created by legal means, or marriage or blood or whatever,” she says. “It’s what we do every day in interaction that creates ourselves as a family.”
The novel vocabulary, the greebles and shush, seems to fascinate people most, perhaps because it’s the easiest part to share and borrow. Whole books of it have been collected. New terms come from in-jokes, children’s mispronunciations, adults who can’t find a word and blurt out some unforgettable substitute. The archetypal examples, Gordon told me, are “things that are understandable to family members in a way they’re not understandable to outsiders” — though she acknowledged that it could be difficult to tell what fit that description. What feels like a unique family quirk will sometimes turn out to be a regionalism imported by a parent who grew up elsewhere, or one last trace of the foreign language an immigrant great-grandparent spoke. This is what I’m hoping will happen with the one word from my parents’ native language, Amharic, that I use without thinking: እንዴ, “endae,” an expression of incredulity covering anything from “can’t believe it” glee to “are you kidding me with this” fury. I would be thrilled if, long after I’m gone, my descendants are still making this noise without really knowing why.
But Gordon wasn’t just interested in vocabulary. She was also interested in habits like the interactive routines she kept spotting. One couple traded specific terms of endearment in a ritualized call and response. Some families swap stock lines in a familiar script, whether it’s their own inventions or, say, movie references. Some aspects of familect are practical, types of shorthand or code — like the old example of a family using “F.H.B.,” or “family hold back,” to indicate that food should be left for guests. But practicality quickly shades into emotional bonds. In her research, Gordon noticed familect being used during conflicts, arguments, negotiations with stubborn toddlers. “I think it introduces a note of solidarity,” she says, “into something that’s otherwise not really a solidarity-based interaction.”
The more I read about familects, the more they also started to feel like fascinating fast-forward scale models of the ways whole languages evolve. Amusing errors and mispronunciations are repeated until they become the new norm — just like the mistakes and mishearings that shaped standard English. When two parents speak differently, their children can produce a hybrid in a few short years, not over the arc of history. Evolutions don’t need decades to spread through the masses; they only need to get across the kitchen or up the stairs.
That inevitable evolution of language includes “familect” itself. Gordon, in her work, spelled it familylect. “And then it got picked up in a couple of media spots a while ago,” she says, “and they decided they liked ‘familect.’” Her reaction is the one you’d expect from a linguist: “Language changes, so either one you want to use is fine.”
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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