The Lexicon of Us: Crafting a Family Dictionary

Several weeks ago, Miss S. came into the kitchen preoccupied with her hair again.  I am beginning to suspect it may be the cross she has to bear from this point onward . . . at least until the real metamorphoses begin in her late twenties. 

That morning I tried not to make notice of how, as she moved between the pantry and the refrigerator, her hands kept on fluttering up, like restless hummingbirds, straightening and smoothing her thick, dark tresses.  

Finally she couldn’t take it any longer.  “Mom, is my hair straight?  It feels tallywallytopsicated.”

 
“It’s lovely.  You look just like Veronica Lake.” 
 
A huge sigh was exorcised as she stared wearily at me and said nothing.  Finally she spun on her heels, defeated, and turned to leave the room.  “Fine.  I will marry Paris.”
 
“You mingo!” Pads charged her with between mouthfuls of cereal.

I laughed in spite of myself at the exchange, which anybody else would think gibberish: Tallywallytopsicated?  Mingo?  What does marrying Paris have to do with anything, and who the heck is Veronica Lake?

We, of course, know . . . but then that’s the point.

Every discourse community, be it a family or otherwise, uses language idiomatically, that is, in an idiosyncratic way.  Some references emerge in one generation and thrive . . .  others ride the skirts of emergent cultural forces . . . still others are spawned from the personal whimsy of a speaker.

Language is no different than a gorgeous, motley fingerprint that each of us leaves over everything we touch and feel and see, really. . . and though we hardly ever notice the smear of it in the context of speaking  . . . the trace of the words we use identify us uniquely.

The joyful challenge is to learn to pay attention to how we, and others, use language, and what the language each of us uses silently says about us.

“We’re going to write a family dictionary,” I told Miss S. later that day.  “We’re going to write dictionary definitions for all the expressions we use at home.”

“Why?” Miss S. asked, all but rolling her eyes.

 “Well . . . so that other people who come to visit might be able to figure out what we’re talking about,” I replied, “And so that you and Pads have a better idea of the history of where some of these words and expressions come from. “

“Okay. . . “ she replied warily.  “Can we begin with tallywallytopsicated, since I made that word up?”

“You bet.”

I sent S. to get the dictionary, and we opened it up.  Choosing the entry for the word case at random, I explained why all the parts of a dictionary definition are there:  spelling, syllable analysis, phonetic spelling, grammatical structure, definition, context, synonym and antonym families, and — as is in the case of my favorite dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical record of a word’s first use. 

 S. wasn’t so much as impressed with my explanation of the purpose of each part of an entry as she was using the entry as a model for her own entry:

Taly/waly/top/sicated.  She wrote diligently (with my guidance).

 
“What does it mean, exactly?” I asked her, having always assumed before that it meant crazy, given the contexts I had heard the word in.

 “It means. . . “ she thought silently for a moment, “dizzy and hot.”

We wrote the phonetic spelling and definition down, along with a sentence for context.  In the final word, Miss S.’s first entry looked like this:

Taly/waly/top/sicated:  [talie walie top sick ated] (adj.): 1. Dizzy and hot.  I am talywalytopsicated after going on the rollercoaster.  Orig. Miss S., general speech. 2011.

This last honorarium delighted her, as did the discovery of the origins of the Veronica Lake reference, and that of ‘I will marry Paris’, which she wrote in subsequent entries:

“Fine, I will marry Paris” (exp.): 1. Whatever, I have no more to say about that.  You want me to clean the dishes?  Fine, I will marry Paris.  Orig. Mom, Uncle Gwa, William Shakespeare, and Jerry Springer.  1995.

“You look like Veronica Lake” (exp.): 1. Your hair is beautifully wavy in the fashion of Veronica Lake, a famous actress from the 1930s and 40s.  Orig. Great Grandma Dorothy, general speech.  1970. 

As we wrote the expressions down, I filled her mind with moving pictures of my young adulthood and childhood. . . of my grandmother telling me my hair looked as lovely as Veronica Lake’s one morning as I entered her kitchen as a child, and then having me watch the classic comedy The Major and the Minor with her, so that I could see whom it was that she was talking about .  .  .

Each word a world of family memory, of shared contexts.

“Hey mingo!” Pads said coming into the room, to no one in particular.

Miss S. and I looked at each other and laughed, gathering up our entries.   It would be a few years before we could have him write up a dictionary definition for that one.