Community Chat

[hennypenny]

@froggy, we always have taken our shoes off when we come in the house. My mother kept a basket of clean Tabis by the door for guests. I am not that thoughtful.

Zoris are zoris, never another name. I am way too old to change.

[ninjawife]

My Italian grandmother used to refer to  meat as chitchy and anything dirty as cocky.   

[ninjawife]

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@Maltichonmom17 wrote:

When I was little, my grandfather called me Schnickelfritz, which I later found out was a German term of endearment for a child who a bit of a rascal or a little chatterbox. (I confess, it was probably all true 😄)

 All we knew of his family background was the Irish side  and I always wondered how I ended up with a German term of endearment as a nickname. A few years back, I started working on our family tree, and discovered that almost all of his maternal side were from Germany, who had emigrated here and settled in Pennsylvania.  Mystery solved. 

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DH and I used to call our oldest daughter Schnickelfritz when she was little.  Schnicklefritz was the name of a cat on the children's TV show The Big Comfy Couch.  When my dad heard us use that nickname for her, he told me his German grandfather used to call him Schnicklefritz.

[ninjawife]

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@godi wrote:

Wash rag for wash cloth, Behint for the word behind and we called paper bags poke. My dad always yelled you kids go out and blow the stink off. 

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My Itanlian grandmother would call a dish towel a mopine.  i believe Rachel Ray uses the same term for her dish towels.

[Lindsays Grandma]

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@Ms tyrion2 wrote:

I had several aunts of grandmother age.

They said Davenport for sofa or couch and pocketbook for purse.

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When I was growing up a sofa was called a couch and a handbag was called a pocketbook.  This was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary.

[kismet]

My mother called green peppers mangoes too.  Imagine when I gave a recipe to a friend and I said it had mangoes in it.  It took awhile to get use to saying green peppers.  The recipe was for Sloppy Joes or as mom called them Wimpies.

[Teddie]

A robe was called a house coat. 

[qualitygal]

Nope, but they were no nonsense people.  They had humor, and were hard-working.  That's what I recall.

[violann]

The reason an “icebox” was called an “icebox” is because they were ICE BOXES. Before WW2, not too many people had electric kitchen appliances, so refrigeration was brought to the house by an ICE MAN.

When I was a kid, they were also called Frigidaires, which was the name of the company who made a lot of them. “Get a Coke from the ‘fridge’” would be as typical as “.....from the ice box...” or “.....from the refrigerator.....”.

Our current fondness for using abbreviated word forms and language forms may ultimately reduce the richness of our language even while it speeds up the conveyance of it, as many of the previous comments suggest. While many of the previous examples were used as commonplace regional vocabulary, some of them still have discreet meaning in certain contexts and geographic areas.

Some others mentioned here are, like “fridge” actually commercially developed names for specific items as a selling tool, to distinguish them from similar items in general usage.

Language, vocabulary, and how we use them. An interesting and always evolving subject!

[cherry]

I pretty much have heard all of them used. I think they just became a part of the language spoken, during that time ,by everyone. People adopted each others expressions ,made them part of theirs

Really its just the same as now. People are inventing words and it becomes part of our vocabulary.