If the above sentence made any sense at all to you, you are either fooling yourself, insane, or a member of my family.
Ah, language, that glorious flowing entity, that delightful, ever-changing dimension of humanity! Why is it that languages are so diverse? What is the reason for over 6,500 different tongues out there, with every conceivable syntax and every phoneme humanly possible? Don't mistake me, I by no means think that this is a new question. Neither am I going to give a fancy, linguistically correct explanation. I simply wish to share an observation that many of you have no doubt observed yourselves.
Whenever a group of people is cut off from the rest of their "tribe" (such as the colonial Americans were somewhat cut off from the British) many curious things regarding their language tend to happen. Like the Americans (upon leaving England), changed their accents and much of their daily terminology, average people (upon leaving the rest of the world) do much the same when they enter the home and family life. Now, I'm not suggesting that the switchover is nearly as drastic as British to American, but surely we can admit that there is some change taking place? Even if it's as simple as using diminutives on objects not often diminutized when speaking to a smallish person, this is still a change worth noting. Especially when this diminutized or otherwise mutated word evolves and becomes part of the family language. When you have one parent seriously telling the other that they need to buy more ba-bas (bottles), something extraordinary has happed. The language has changed. A new, functional, often completely unique word has been born. What's more, these words are often passed down from generation to generation as family heirlooms, occasionally leading to embarrassment when used outside the "tribe". As an American is likely to get blank stares or be laughed at when she tells an uninformed Brit that she made some cookies (not biscuits), so would a man be who tells his boss he was late because he had to buy ba-bas.
The words resulting from diminutization are not even the most interesting. The most fascinating examples of this phenomenon occur when something more complicated (or even simpler) takes place. However, I must admit that even these types are often or usually connected with children. For instance, one day when my aunt was little, she went up to several members of the tribe and asked if they wanted to see her base. At first they thought she maybe meant face....but, no - she meant her base, which in Modern English is known as the armpit. To this day no one knows why she insisted on her armpits being called bases, but they have remained bases to this day. In fact, this was so ingrained in our family culture, that I only learned that they were armpits (what a terribly vile word! I shudder as I say it) to the rest of the English speaking world when I was old enough to have said bases 30,000 times in public(!!!), oblivious no doubt to the odd faces I was receiving. This one word spawned at least one new term, basedrilling, which means, roughly, "To mercilessly tickle an individual's armpits to the extent that it is rather painful and often results in a wrestling match and/or crying".
Of course, not all of these words come from the small people. When my mom was little, my grandfather used to call the clothes that you would put out at night for the next day skelets. My grandfather, being quite clever, (albeit a bit eccentric) drew this word from skeleton, so I'm told. Again, it is regularly used to this day, and, once more, I was left in the dark till just recently (Well, how was I supposed to know!? It's not a concept frequently discussed, you know).
So there you have it. Family-Speak is a language, or at least a dialect. Perhaps in this way one can more easily grasp one aspect of how languages evolved. Who knows what our family would be speaking if we were all isolated for hundreds of years! And who knows how much of any given language came about like this, in which case it would be nearly impossible to discover the etymologies of the words in question? Who knows, indeed.
Examples of our family vocabulary:
Base: Armpit
Skelet: Clothes set out before bed
Ba-ba: Bottle
BeeBoBie: Peanut butter sandwich - warped child-speak
Bomb: Bottom; behind; butt - child-speak (unable to say bottom)
Boom: Feces; poop - In an attempt to avoid vulgarity, my nurse grandmother used B.M. (bowel movement) with her children, which evolved into boom.
Guarantees: A certain type of candy. My grandmother always told my mother that she would "guarantee you won't like them." So my toddler mother always called them "guarantees"
Hairstyles: Ponytail holders, ribbons, et cetera
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