Opinion: Familect is what you get when you smush the words “family” and “dialect” into one word. And you end up with "sqwacks" and "sqwans".

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We had spent the day at the park, looking at the sqwacks and sqwans when he went boom, got an owie, resulting in a trip to the hoppitable for snitches. To make everything better, the day concluded with a great asghetti dinner and two scoops. Thank heaven, we didn’t lose his su-su-gah in the process.

Translation: We had spent the day at the park, looking at the ducks and swans, when he fell, hurt himself, resulting in a trip to the hospital for stitches. To make everything better, the day concluded with a great spaghetti dinner and ice cream for dessert. Thank heaven, we didn’t lose his pacifier in the process.

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That’s an example of what’s known as a “familect,” which is what you get when you smush the words “family” and “dialect” into one word. Although families are well-recognized for inventing their own private vernaculars, until 2009, there was no academic term that defined the idea.

That’s when a young Georgetown University prof coined the term for the ways that families create language unique to their own subset. Familect encompasses the inside jokes, the zany evolutions of words, the pet names, and the intentionally mispronounced terms that seem automatically generated within a group.

Perhaps familects are an odd thing to study. I mean, who really cares if your family calls cucumbers, cumbercues? But it does provide an interesting way at looking at how language evolves, and how language is a reflection of just about everything.

Take for example the word apron. An apron serves an obvious purpose, but at some point in human history, someone had to say, “Let’s take a length of fabric and fashion it as protection.” Now, the idea of a tablecloth has existed for millennia — laying down a fabric cover for a surface elevated the act of eating. That fabric would have been called, in Latin, a mappa, or in Old French, a nappe, or nape. The thinking is that, long ago, someone took a tablecloth and wrapped it around themselves as they tended the fire, resulting in the Middle English term napron. Over time, the preceding “n” was discarded and now you’ll find an apron hanging from a peg in most kitchens.

This discarding of preceding “n”s happened a lot over time. A word for a type of snake — an adder — used to have an “n” before it — naddre — and the word for umpire also started out with a “n” at its beginning. Umpire derives from late Middle English, noumpere, which meant arbitrator. By the time baseball had caught on in North America, the word was morphing to what we know today — umpire.

How does this happen? Why does it happen? What does it tell us about ourselves? Well, it can tell us a lot.

Baseball teams are referred to as clubs. That’s because long before they became professional, baseball teams were fraternal organizations for people of leisure. The players wore straw boaters and the social gathering was considered more important than the score. As competition heated up, the clubs started bringing in ringers and it wasn’t long before the game was launched on the path to where we are today, with Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700-million contract.

Baseball would go on to add dozens of terms — “curveball” and “strikeout” among them — to the North American dialect, many of which have never strayed from this continent. Take the case of British football versus the North American version of the same, which we call soccer. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, British fans chose to call the sport “football” in the 1980s as a backlash to American fans choosing the word “soccer”. In some ways, this is the equivalent of one family’s cumbercue being another family’s cuke-a-dukes.

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