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Children's Vocabulary

carole

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Did any of you have special words for particular things when you were kids?

Sometimes it's due to the word being rather difficult for childish lips to get round - my no 1 son used to call Mercedez Benz cars 'Ladies Benz'

Or it might be a made up word which has connections to the thing being named - I used to call lemonade 'Sissy Beer', because of the 'ssss' sound the bottle would make when it was opened.

But others are more mysterious - I used to call nuns 'Hut Nannas'

Any other interesting examples?

Carole
 
I used to call my mum "Woo woo" when I was very small (just talking). No idea why though. lol It used to embarrass her when I called her it when we were outside. :D
Fig Rolls were "meat biscuits". I used to actually like the things.
:cross eye
 
I called record players ooties. My parents say I'd stand up in my crib, point at the record player, and go ootie! ootie! For my 2nd birthday or something they made me a ootie cake.
 
I used to call dogs "foofs" which I think was a juvenile rendering of the word woof. I even had two stuffed toys called big foof and little foof.
 
i thought i would evelope thes sort of thing with Harry but he seems to speek english most of the time. I was suprised by a mate who when he stayed with us spoke a very strange langage to his 2 yr old indeed!...these are the examples i can remeber...

Bi Lo Bo = Big lorry
Chic Dee = Chicken
Toe = potato
Lob Lob = sleep
CA = car
 
There were no Fruit Pastilles for me.. oh no.. all I ever wanted were Cloppa Castles :)
 
When my brother and I were wee kids (Being potty trained and all that.) , my mum used to refer to male and female 'parts' as 'dodos' ?! :confused: Gawd knows where she got that idea from. Imagine my surprise when I found out they where extinct birds! :D
 
My daughter still calls the stereo the "dancing box". And refers to her genitalia as her "koo" (From the portugese for kiss my a**, which sounds like "beja ma koo" - no idea how it's really spelled.)
 
I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no way that I am going to refer
to the thing between my legs as my wee-wee-er. For some curious
reason it turns people right off. :(
 
My daughter watched the film "Geneviere" when she was two, and for over a year she called vinegar "geneviere"
 
My sister always used to call any sort of pre-historic bird a Flobodactyl or Flobos for short.
My cousin used to call our Gran "Granny May" which was odd considering her name was Myrle and no one has ever called her May.
 
My little brother was only two or three when our little sister was born. Her name was Schley (pronounced like Shelly) but my little brother called her "Falfer". I think we even began to call her that sometimes just because it was so strange.
 
My mother taught piano when I was a toddler, and had a local protogée named Fiona. I got utterly confused and wound up calling her "Fee-arr-no".

Also, my first word was -- allegedly -- "eejit".
 
Lord Pineapple said:
My daughter watched the film "Geneviere" when she was two, and for over a year she called vinegar "geneviere"

And I used to call vinegar 'bingia' (with a hard 'g')

My cousin's grandaughter used to call cucumber 'cumber'.

Carole
 
When my little boy was learning to speak he used to called water "faggle". (Don't ask me why!)

He also started saying "Fendi da" which we finally translated as "fancy that (it's Dipsy's hat)" from The Teletubbies.

When he was almost 3 we all went on a big family hols (including my out laws) and to differentiate between my Dad and my father in law he'd call one Ganga (my Dad) and Pango for the other.

He still calls my boyfriend's Dad Pango at the age of 5 bless him.
 
I'm afraid I never came up with any words of my own (I must have been a very boring child), but one of my sisters invented some gems. One we still use is "daddy-di-dum" for electricity pylon. We also had "stokel-dougle" for doorbell. (introduced rather alarmingly by her asking "Daddy, can I play with your stokel-dougle?")
Her daughters have carried on the tradition, and they have about 10 of them.
But my favourite was when one niece used to say "very smart" (as in "you look very smart"), and it would come out as "belly fart". We used to get her to say it a lot. :p
 
When I was learning to talk I called milk "muck" and strangely enough grew up with an aversion to drinking fresh milk.
I also managed to turn "I could've sworn ......" into "I could have a swan......"
My son used to ask for bamwiches, while my friend's son preferred frisps.
As a one-off he turned a misheard news item into "Mammy - some gorillas have taken ostriches to these people. Do gorillas keep ostriches as pets?" In spite of the severity of the truth (guerillas taking hostages, in case you hadn't sussed it out) I had to smile.
 
One gem from my friend's son's writing book in primary school:

'A volcano is a mountain with hot lager flowing down the sides.'

Carole
 
My eleven year old cousin wrote a lovely mini-essay about the earthquake they had in Dudley a couple of months ago.

She wrote that it measured 4.8 on the rectum scale. :p
 
My daughter saw a picture of Max Schreck as Nosferatu while I was browsing eBay earlier this evening.

She asked what it was, so I told her it was a vampire and explained that they drink blood (which she thought was funny).

We then moved on to talk about her grandpa, who had sent me a picture of his dog earlier in the day, and she seems to have conflated the two things.

At bedtime she told Mrs Yith that grampires come at night and drink your blood.
 
My daughter saw a picture of Max Schreck as Nosferatu while I was browsing eBay earlier this evening.

She asked what it was, so I told her it was a vampire and explained that they drink blood (which she thought was funny).

We then moved on to talk about her grandpa, who had sent me a picture of his dog earlier in the day, and she seems to have conflated the two things.

At bedtime she told Mrs Yith that grampires come at night and drink your blood.
Pictured: a grampire.
220px-Al_Lewis_01.jpg
 
I feel much of the lexicon of JP Rowling's Harry Potter universe seems to spring from these sorts of childhood mondegreens & eggcorns.

It's tempting to conclude (perhaps without any basis in fact: non-Anglophones, please feel free to loudly disagree) that: because the English language has such a massive vocabulary, and such an enormous range of nuanced synonyms (often with polyglotten pasts) the English language is an advantagously-mongrel melting-pot for neovocal nippers and artistic authors alike.

Put another way: is there any evidence to suggest that eg Russian/German/ Dutch kids display less mondegreenic speech sets than English-babbling babies? Note - I'm going to postulate that French, Spanish, Italian (and....French) bairns would be potentially lower-down, substantially, on the curve of propensity-towards-pediatric-eggcornness.
 
Interesting question! Looking at the wikipedia page on mondegreens, it does give an example from a french book of quotes from children.

a misunderstood lyric of "La Marseillaise" (the French national anthem): "Entendez-vous ... mugir ces féroces soldats" (Do you hear those savage soldiers roar?) is heard as "...Séféro, ce soldat" (that soldier Séféro).

Definitely something lost in translation there.

Wikiquote has a whole bunch from that book, at least some of which I suspect are mondegreens or malapropisms, but my French isn't good enough to be sure.

https://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/La_Foire_aux_cancres

EDIT:

This also puts me in mind of the 'bad kids jokes' blog. http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com/

if spayders cant wak thay wood be rasins
 
I occasionally drag out "cumbumber" to amuse the Teenager, as that was what she initially called that iconic green fruit. (I guess it's actually a fruit because it's all seedy?)
 
Eldest just had us in stitches with a new term for something. My wife asked him to remind us what he had taken for harvest festival. His response... English Spam.

Can anyone guess?

Tinned Corned Beef
 
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