We have our own language in our family.
Or I should say we appropriate words and weave them into the Morris-Wood parlance.
Maybe it's only me who has ever noticed because I am, without doubt, passionate about language. But more than language. Words. And everything you can conjure with them. Where they come from, the way you say them. The structure of them. Even the typographic artistry of men like Bodoni and Baskerville can set my heart racing as I recount tales of how they almost met and the wonderful Mrs Eaves and the swooping beauty of the typeface created in her honour. *The 'ws' are awesome, truly awesome*
But everyone in my family has little turns of phrase that make me smile - and maybe that's where my obsession roots.
Take my grampy. Gramps always said: 'Dean, are your lallies aching?' Now they generally were, thanks to the five-mile route marches around the ammo dump, blackberrying on fine Sunday afternoons in late summer from the age of seven. But "lallies"...?
Lallies means legs. It's polari. My gramps was a cooper and spent time down south in port towns making barrels for the Navy. I'm guessing that's where he picked that one up.
He also came back with tattoos. Blurry pictures, a two-mast ship and two hands held over a heart with a black bar.
"Why's there a black bar, Grampy?" I asked him once, pulling at it with my thumb to see if I could blur it any more. "Because it had a lady's name there," said the great Jack Wood. I must have stared at him questioningly for long enough because he added, eventually. "..And it wasn't your Nana's name."
Way to go, Grampy!!
2008-04-25 @ 23:15