All Words Are Words

This is a thing I have said, more than once.

Welcome to Christine’s Extremely Permissive Theory of Words™, which has not been peer-reviewed and probably never will be.

Under this theory, magillion is a word.

A magillion is a number. A nonspecific but presumably large number. There might be a magillion people somewhere. Something might cost a magillion dollars. I might have told you something a magillion times.

Sometimes it’s exaggerated for comedic effect.

Sometimes I just mean a magillion.

I have no idea when my husband Jon and I started saying it or which of us said it first.

Who remembers who said what first anymore?

Fnak, on the other hand, has at least a partial paper trail.

It was probably a typo of fank, which was already a deliberately cute version of thank. Once fnak showed up, though, fank went the way of the dodo. We embraced the silliness of the typo and made it the whole thing.

Now I type fnak. Jon types fnak.

Jon also says it out loud.

I don’t.

Why?

Because that’s not how I use it.

Nobody decided this.

Nobody formally approved magillion as a number or determined that spoken fnak was permissible for Jon but not really for me. There was no Christine and Jon Linguistic Standards Committee.

And yet: we have rules.

We just never made them.

Nobody Approved This

I started thinking about all of this after reading a New York Times Magazine piece by Nitsuh Abebe about the private languages families develop—the odd words, phrases and speech habits that make perfect sense to the people inside them and sometimes very little sense to anyone else.1

It turns out there is a name for at least some of this.

Sociolinguist Cynthia Gordon uses the term familylect for the repeated, ritualized ways of speaking that help create a distinct family culture—not just unusual words, but repeated phrases, patterns, pitch, intonation and other ways of talking that accumulate meaning through use.2

That feels much closer to what I’m interested in than simply collecting a list of funny things people say.

Because the list has grammar.

Please Observe Proper Beepo Grammar

My cat RJ can be a beepo.

He can also be a bappo.

He cannot have a bappo.

That’s wrong.

Even “RJ is beepo” makes me a little uncomfortable. It needs the a.

Who established this grammar?

Apparently me.3

You can use a word that isn’t in the dictionary incorrectly.

The rules aren’t permanent, either. Someone uses something “wrong.” Someone else understands it anyway. They use it again. Eventually the wrong version may become the version everybody uses.

Language is delightfully annoying like that.

You can also deliberately invent something and discover that nobody else is interested in participating.4

You can make a word by yourself.

Shared language requires somebody else.

Apparently Etymology Is Optional

“Thanks, Starkeisha.”

That one requires almost no vocabulary lesson. Every word involved is already English.

It does, however, need to be said deadpan. Completely monotone.

Starkeisha was the username of a stranger in an online Uno game. Something dumb happened. I said, “Thanks, Starkeisha.”

That’s it. That’s the origin story.

I don’t think about the Uno game when I say it now. Something stupid happens and Starkeisha gets blamed for it.

The closest cultural translation is probably “Thanks, Obama!” except Starkeisha has now been held responsible for years of completely unrelated stupidity.

The Uno game tells you where the phrase came from.

It doesn’t really tell you what the phrase means anymore.

Some origins are even less cooperative.

“The end.”

At some point this became a way of definitively finishing a statement or discussion. The end. Nothing else to say.

Then it became:

“The end, horse butt.”

I do not know why.

Then:

“The end, horse butt, headbutt.”

Presumably because headbutt sounds enough like horse butt that somebody’s brain decided they belonged together.

And eventually the core form became:

“The end, horse butt, headbutt, your mom.”

There have been longer variants.

Obviously.

There is something deeply satisfying about a phrase designed to declare that nothing else can possibly be added evolving almost entirely through the addition of increasingly unnecessary things.

I couldn’t tell you why horse butt got there in the first place. I have no idea when your mom joined the party.

It doesn’t matter.

I know what belongs.

Apparently etymology is optional.

My dad had his own version of this, except instead of inventing a phrase he simply refused to let one die.

For years, he called television “Cablevision.”

This was originally grounded in reality. Cablevision was our cable provider.

But Dad didn’t just call the service Cablevision. Television itself became Cablevision.

“Is there anything good on Cablevision?”

This used to drive me nuts.

I studied television. I worked in television. Cablevision was a company. Television was a medium. Words mean things.

Then Cablevision got acquired.5

Eventually my dad had AT&T streaming.

For YEARS, it was still Cablevision.

My mom and I knew exactly what he meant. We didn’t start calling television Cablevision ourselves. We just eventually stopped requiring him to translate.

And then there are words your cat makes you invent.

RJ can snonf.

Snonf is 100 percent mine. As far as I know, there is no lost internet origin waiting to be uncovered. My brain just produced it.

A snonf is not merely a sniff.

It is an olfactory investigation.

Multiple sniffs. Nose fully engaged. Information is being gathered. There may be visible nose squinches.

If ham is involved, RJ may also become Hambrain.

Hambrain does a heckin snonf.6

Because of Course It Was 1993

I’ve been thinking about a Calvin and Hobbes strip for more than 30 years. It ran in January 1993—because of course it was 1993—and Calvin is talking about turning words into verbs.

“Verbing weirds language.”

Which it does.

It also makes perfect sense.

Linguists call the process of shifting a word into another grammatical category without changing its basic form conversion.7

But I don’t think the reason that line stayed with me is that nine-year-old me was already fascinated by morphological conversion.

I just liked that Calvin could break the language in a way that proved how well the language worked.

You understood him.

That question—what exactly someone has to know in order to understand you—is where things get more interesting.

You Had to Be There

There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Darmok.”

The Universal Translator is working. Picard understands the individual words.

He still has no idea what anybody is saying.

“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

The Tamarians communicate through references to stories from their shared cultural history. Picard has the words; what he doesn’t have is the history behind them.8

Memes are culturally our Darmok.

“This is fine.”

“One does not simply…”

Woman yelling at cat.

You don’t need me to finish the sentence, explain the image or provide the original context if you already know the meme.

You bring all of that with you.

Shared context lets us communicate by omission.

And it doesn’t require an entire culture.

“Bye, I love you!”

“Covered in bees!”

That is a perfectly appropriate exchange among some of my friends.

No, I’m not explaining it.

A definition could tell you what each individual word means. An origin story could tell you how the exchange started.

Neither would give you all the times it has happened since.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

The history isn’t just trivia surrounding the language.

Sometimes the history is in the language.9

What the Definition Leaves Out

Which brings me back to my extremely permissive definition of a word.

Try telling someone from the American South that y’all isn’t a real word. See how that goes.

Y’all does not need my defense.10

Obviously y’all and magillion do not have the same reach.

Millions of people know y’all.

Jon and I know magillion.

I just reject the premise that reach determines whether either one gets to be a word.

Jon can text me fnak because I paid the bills.

Fnak.

Because I reminded him to thaw the meat for dinner.

Fnak.

Because I said something nice about him.

Fnak.

And I smile.

“Thank you” would mean exactly the same thing.

Except it wouldn’t.

“Thank you” feels formal and stuffy between us now.

Fnak means thank you.

But fnak is us.

These stupid little words and phrases are artifacts of time spent together.

You could learn the definitions.

You still wouldn’t have the history.

But you’ve been here for a little while now.

So if I tell you Hambrain is doing a heckin snonf, you have a pretty good idea what’s happening.

Nobody formally taught you the rules.

Change approved.