My husband deliberately pronounces New Hampshire "New Hamster". And a boy I knew in fifth grade - Shawn Sunberg - used to pronounce spaghetti "pusgetti".

There are a slew of others I wish I could share. In our family, where first languages range from Hungarian to Tagalog to Spanish, variations in the pronunciation of English words have always been commonplace.

I love your dad's idiolect (especially "squiddle" - it reminds me of the pert way squirrels wiggle their bushy tails - usually when they're about to commit some heinous crime, like unstuffing the scarecrow in the garden). English never sounded so sprightly!

Thanks for sharing.

my dad calls oranges 'or-lang', and sean connery 'seen kana-lee'. he also calls mousedeer 'minicows'. :)

What is it with old guys? My dad mispronounces EVERYTHING. My favorite of his is "deaf", as in rhymes with leaf.

A friend of my wife calls French toast "tugboat toast," and ice-cream sandwiches are "cardboard Cadillacs." And a host of other interesting, private little names for things.

Few of my favorites form my midwestern upbringing:

Pea-ickle-pay: pickles

Tay-toe-tee Chips: potate chips

and of course "salad" whcih isn't so much the way you say it or refer to it, but what it is.

and from a roadtrip down to Big Sur, passing an Artichoke stand where letters had fallen off it's sign: tich kes (tich-keys). Haven't referred to them in any other way since.

My dad had a unique spin on the spelling thing, rather than the pronounciation..... when leaving phone messages from my friends, he'd write "Lorry called" or "Niky is on her way". I couldn't fathom what was going through his head.... But now I do recall the very common use of "acrost" when "across" would have been appropriate. What can I say, he was a small town veterinarian transplanted to North Jersey, of all places!?

Oh, and at my last job, we had pet names for all of the vendor-supplied packages we were forced to use even though they weren't really suitable (The business of business is business). So OpenDeploy became "OpenDestroy" or "Hope-n-Deploy."
Entrust GetAccess became "Encrust," or "GetRootAccess"

Most of the idiolectic words in my family come from how one of the kids pronounced words when young. "byeck"=grape, "hippopanominus"=you can guess. My brother's word for both "tomato" and "potato" was "p'nato", so he had to distinguish between red p'natoes and white p'natoes. When I see a phrase like "Fried Green Tomatoes" or "Peruvian Blue Potatoes", I get a little chuckle.

Along the same lines as "dramastic," I used to work with a guy who often got "flustrated."

I'm prone to malaprops, which is usually something you don't look for in a communications professional. Here's the penultimate: I once told someone who was sick that they need euthanasia. I meant to say echanacia. *oops*

It's my mother that makes up words in my family. She started intentionally making up cute-isms when i was little. "Crippins" is Christmas, "hunky" is hungry, "i laloo" is I love you, "kiddlies" is the sand in one's eye, "de pawnin" is good morning, "aminal" is animal, among others. The hilarious thing is that I still use the word "kiddlies" quite seriously to refer to sand in the eyes!

I refer to those using the deliberately uncute term "eye boogers", and Stewart corrects me, insisting they're "sleep".

i was in a meeting last week where two gems were actually thrown down.....and NO-ONE reacted.

margarine of error

new leash on life

What the heck is a mousedeer?!

"I'm up to my earballs in work."

My sister was learning to talk and I was learning my letters. I was writing the letter E. So a pen was and ee-ee.

My neighbor pronounces the sign of Virgo as Veer-go. And wolf is of course, woof.

And my father calls the dogs leash a lish.

It's idioglossia time here in central Vermont where greg and I make up words to keep each other on our toes. So it's "answer the pelopone, sweets" or "I'm heading to the postopolis to mail this letter" or "I'm getting really frusticated that I can't get this CSS working correctly"

I also have special places in my idiolexicon for words that I used to mispronounce but now know the correct pronunciations. The old words are still there, as shadow words or ghost words, but I don't say them anymore. The one I think about the most is Yosemite Sam whose last name I always thought rhymed with 'dog bite"

some of these words are proving to be universal (or pretty near)Pusgetti and Asparagrass are part of the idiolexicon in my family as is New Hampster (which is used by a lot of massachusetts natives to describe the state directly to the north.) another favorite is cow hampshire.

We've also got rice pilff, gingee ale,
hootie (for hat) and cakaputzti (clutter) which comes from my aunt, she claims it's Yiddish. There are tons of words and phrases my mother used to say, and when I'd ask her what they meant, she'd say she didn' know but they described the situation and her feelins exactly. I think is was some fractured combo of Yiddish Italian and English. I said I think.

Recommened: John Lennon's first book "In His Own Write" -- Lennon had his own idiolexicon that was, I believe pretty close to an actual language. Ph.D. candidtes, take note.

cheers to a great thread!

francesa

My mom, who was an English major at Syracuse 50 some odd years ago, mispronounced misled to sound like missled until she was well into adult hood.

My dad always said JULery instead of JEWELry, which drove my mother batty.

They have since divorced.

My husband's greatest was "He's climbing up the wrong bark."

Very, very late at night/ very, very early in the morning, after writing a very long art history paper on Robert Campin, my exasperated partner reworked "the straw that broke the camel's back" into "that's one too many feathers on the Bible". I immediately convinced her to title the paper with it and go to bed. She got the A, but demurred when the professor inquired after the origin of her obscure "allusion". It remains my favorite example of how anyone turn themselves into Jean Cocteau, given enough stress and lack of shuteye.

How 'bout..
nip it in the butt.

exercise in fertility.

Looking for a taxloop ( loophole?)

Shana once said:

Shit or cut bait.

And

69 it.

When she meant 86 it.

My mom calls my sister and me her "grills" instead of girls. We get tee-red (tired). My husband's family "goes seeps" instead of going to bed - generally as in "I go seeps now." My husband and sister and I have a ton of them. We get ex-howsted (exhausted). We take out the garbahj (garbage). I think everyone goes to Tarzhay instead of Target these days, right? Mostly we do this knowing the correct pronunciation though. Phrases like "half of one, six dozen of the other" and "six of one, half dozen of your mother" get bandied around a lot. One that I honestly mispronounced in my head for years was maniacal. I pronounced it like maniac with an ul on the end. I could go on...

I still sometimes say renenber, but I had a lot of them as a kid ('becited' was excited and more strangely, 'dee' was sit, 'tcha-chich' was cracker) -- many of these stuck around my family.

(Also, since I spent the first five years of my life in the middle of nowhere and there was only one other kid around, I thought all children were called 'Noah'.)

(p.s. Solution for the not remembering info thing: the comments pop-up goes to caterinafake.com, not caterina.net so it is a cross-domain cookie thing. If instead hit the 'LINK' link and use the comment form on the single entry page, it remembers your info.)

my mother, somehow having developed southern tendencies in not only cookery but speech as well, says to warsh the dishes in the zink....as kids we were constantly tormenting her about these words, as only kids can, the results of which were only our getting in trouble and her continuing to mispronounce the words. speaking of mis-pronounce, a common one with my fellow english teachers is to say their students had a lot of "mispronOUnciation" instead of mispronUnciation....
again, some things never change: my corrections render dirty looks and no change in pronunciation.....oy.

"I feel a sense of impeding doom."

What a great thread. Thanks.

My mother does a strange squirrel thing, halfway between 'scriddle' and 'scruddle'.
Kids are good at 'em too, Ben (5) says 'berember' for remember, and 'sumparine' for any underwater vehicle.
My unfavourite in everyday usage is 'pacific', as in, "Well, Mr Blair, do you have any pacific reason for wanting to go to war at this time?"

I refer to my lover as my "partner," but in my mother's mouth it comes out "pardner," which sounds less feminist and more Wild West.

An ex always mangled folk sayings. One I remember is, "a half dozen chickens and something else." That's for "six of one, a half dozen of the other." I still use it.

My best friend has never forgiven her parents for not teaching her the right words before sending her off to school. My two favorites of hers are gazed, meaning scarred and carter sauce for tarter sauce.

From my mom:

In explaining the Mexican avocado dip she recently had, she called it Glocca Morra...

Books-on-tape were "movies where they talk 'em"...

awwww! they look like gerbils with big heads :D

My father - quite undeliberately - used the wrong word with the funniest results. We used to call them his "Archie Bunkerisms". After having a pleasant dinner at a friend's home, he said to his wife on the way home, "That was really very nice. Someday we should retaliate."

My most embarrasing "ism" was when I was at a bar and ordered a bloody virgin instead of a virgin mary. The bartender looked at me like I was nuts.