Family Lexicon
The guys are at Readercon; I wish I could be there, but I must work. By temperament, I don't like being alone, but this time seems not so horrible. The rats are getting even more attention from me.

Many of the families I know, with kids or not, have many terms of their own, sometimes coming from funny incidents. For a while, I've thought about sharing some of our family language & asking you guys if you feel like sharing yours.

1. "thank the pig": This is our euphemism for masturbation.

Not that we particularly feel masturbation needs a euphemism, but this one seems weird yet friendly & appropriate. It comes from a very odd scene in Babe: Pig in the City, in which a queue of animals each almost ritually takes some food, is told "Thanks the pig!" and says to Babe, "Thank you, pig." womzilla and I, who saw the film, were just captivated by the phrase & figured all along it had to have some place in our life.

2. "Did you buy Beowulfs?": Or just a reference to wanting beowulfs, chocolate beowulfs, any mention of beowulfs as food.

This comes from my birth family. During one diet, all of us wrote up, on a page on the refrigerator door, what we ate and its caloric content. My oldest sister, who could copy my mother's handwriting almost perfectly, wrote in my mother's column, "1 beowulf 500 calories." My mother (very mentally sharp then!) actually wondered what a beowulf was, when she'd eaten it, and why she'd given in to something with so many calories.

Now, supergee buys the grocery, and we always keep a pad of grocery lists up, each of us writing what we need or run out of. Perhaps it was the coincidence of writing up food on a list on a refrigerator door, but one day I wrote "2 beowulfs," spreading the joke to a new household. Alas, the supermarket never has beowulfs. They are always out. Can you believe it? Even sugar-free beowulfs, chocolate beowulfs--any kind! Even when one of us had heard it was beowulf season, or that beowulfs were on sale!

3. "make an offering" or "an offering to the gods": In full, "make an offering to the garbage gods," that is putting the garbage out in the can or the cans by the curb.

supergee says he started this as a complaint, actually, because the gods--capricious as so many gods are--do, alas, sometimes reject our offering, and sometimes it is indeed a big relief if the gods find our offering right & good. I just thought it was fun, a way to make an everyday task sound a little more glamorous or important.

What terms have you guys developed, and what are the stories behind them?

HEALTH: I'm past the "OMG physical movement!" euphoria for now, and it's best to just treat treading as something I have to do every day, which it is. However, my fasting bg is coming down for the first time since I stabilized with the Januvia added (c. 140 down to c. 120), which is really cool. I'm up to 20 minutes on good days, 15 minutes on less enthusiastic days such as yesterday.

Mood: sociable over morning coffee