made up words?

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snowywinter • 25 September 2022 at 1:50 AM

Do you have any made up words you use so often that others know what you mean when you use them; or you say them without thought or that others might not?

I have one in particular. atiba (eh-tah-bah /ed-i-bah/ eh-ta-buh.)
I've tried to think about what it actually means. At it's core, its literal translation is something akin to "this thing." But contextually the meaning is usually "Do you want this?" "May I have this?" "This thing is interesting?" "Please inspect this thing." "Take this." and sometimes "What?" / "Please elaborate."
So it can either indicate a thing, or asking for more information. It's sort of inflection and contextual based.
I'm not sure if it ever had an origin. I think it was just some sounds i had started to throw together and it just stuck. Maybe my brain has derived it from 'it' or 'edible' ???
(But I never intended for it to take on meaning or was looking to create my own language. It just naturally comes from me at times. *shrug* It's mine now. Though I think this is the first I ever typed it out.)

I've tried getting 'yebiday' to stick but no one seems to use it often.
The day before yesterday. Combining yesterday and bi (meaning two). I mean we have cool words like penultimate to mean 'the next to last'. And yebiday is so many less syllables. And 'two days ago' is frequently used enough that it deserves its own word.
But that one doesn't even always come to my mind freely. And it's not like I invented it; all the base was already there.

For this thread I'm looking mostly for completely made up words like my example above... but cool new combinations would be fun to hear about too. (I also like to hear about old uncovered old archaic definitions and long forgotten about words... but that's another subject altogether.)

Hee, was handing my dog a piece of fruit leather and she was sniffing around for more lentil (flour) pasta on the floor and wasn't looking. I said 'atiba' and she instantly whipped around and took the fruit from me (just a tiny piece.) (This is amusing, as I hardly ever use it with her, just other humans.)

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hikanu • 1 October 2022 at 10:57 AM

We have some weird family language-thing going on sometimes. Especially back when we still had our dog.

We had fun with, or well it was mostly my dad, really. It must have started after we watched The Mummy or something, and we started using something akin to "Imhotep" and a handful of varieties to describe how we or the dog interacted with blankets. xD

Imitep = To be snug in my blanket
Amitep = "Get off my blanket"
Pomitep = On (top of) my blanket

Iditep, Aditep og Poditep would be the same but with your blanket instead.

And "nubi" or "tubi" is a nose. I do not know why. Nubi is the word I uses the most without thought, though. xD

And this year my mom has taken to calling cats "El Miso"

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snowywinter • 3 October 2022 at 11:31 PM

@hikanu
That is so cool, I love it!
(Sort of reminds me of how we stole the word 'potato' and use it for a lot of usages. But the most frequent relate to the dog and the blankets.)

"Family language" is indeed a thing. I don't know why I didn't think of the phrasing for it. People who use Sign Language are very familiar with how special words are made up among family. ^^

lol... well, the nose is a nub on our faces. (Probably not how it came to be that you use it, but that's the logic my brain followed. - And there's an anthropology psychologist I love to read, and she says it's a common trait among most languages and cultures that we add an i/y/ee sound to the end of words where there was none, on things we like.) : )

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hikanu • 4 October 2022 at 12:30 PM

Couch potato! 😃

I like that logic, I'll probably have to ask my mom about the nose thing, I bet she's the instigator of that one. It's just like that and I've never bothered to ask why it is like that. xD

It's a bit like a dialect, while my country isn't exactly big and I have friends or acquaintances all over the place, I had a conversation with a friend, she lives relatively close to me geographically, and another friend/acquaintance was listening and ended up asking me what we were talking about. I had used a word that was so common for me to use that I didn't stop to consider that someone living 3½ hours away wouldn't know that word. xD
A family language is just even more local.

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