Dialect develops in families
Dan Brown is good. But as ingenious as “The Da Vinci Code” may be, the author can’t compete with the average American family, office staff and college campus in the fabrication of impenetrable codes.
Not those complex computer codes or ubiquitous bar codes or the lol codes used in so many IMs. Rather, the secret acronyms, subtextual phrases and redefined nouns that people invent at home, at work and among friends. Insider stuff fulfilling some innate, Spanky-and-Our-Gang need to own key words that unlock the clubhouse door.
Chris Park, president of the Lucent Foundation, came up with a cautionary acronym when she was raising her daughter, Erin, in St. Paul, Minn. Each time Erin left the house to go out on a date or some other unsupervised excursion, Park would say, “UGJ!”
It meant “Use good judgment.”
Erin is now a 28-year-old graduate student and lives in Germantown, Pa., with her husband, David Cohn, a literacy coach. Cohn, whose family never had any codes, was introduced to FHB by his wife. The term, shorthand for “family hold back,” is used in case of the dinner-party equivalent of an overbooked flight. When there isn’t enough food to go around, the host whispers “FHB,” which means that if any members of the inner circle are planning to heap their plates high, they’d better not.
Academics have developed a term for these kinds of codes. It’s called “familylect,” says Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and author of “You’re Wearing THAT?”
“There’s an efficiency, communicating with fewer words, and you’re tickled that you have this private language that shows you’re close,” Tannen says. Codes “take meaning not only from the current conversation but previous ones.” They not only serve as a “shorthand for history,” but also allow people to deliver potentially upsetting messages in a gentler way.
The UGJ, for instance. “It’s a way of coming across without haranguing. You can say things that might be obvious and get away with it. First, there’s an element of humor involved. Second, you didn’t really say it. And third, you’re invoking the family closeness. For those three reasons, it works.”
“People invent private language to give themselves a sense of confederacy,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, professor of linguistics at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. (An institution that requires an acronym if there ever was one.)
“When you create a word, it conveys solidarity. It’s a sign of being separate,” Nunberg says. “In relationships, people have little abbreviations and pet names which suggest a private experience and a shared history.”
Like slang or street code or every generation’s need to come up with a new word for “good,” he says, it is human nature for groups large and small to develop new words to signal that their tastes are different from those of outsiders.
And when words fail, some families resort to nonverbal signals. After Mark Miller’s mother developed Alzheimer’s and could no longer live on her own, she moved in with his family.
“Our dog was very upset about having a new person in the house,” says his wife, Jennifer. Lacking a more eloquent outlet for its frustration, the dog took to gnawing on its front leg.
“So now, when we’re annoyed,” says Jennifer, “We do this.” She stuck her forearm in her mouth and pretended to chew on it like an ear of corn.
Dan Brown, eat your heart out.