Caution: this post contains the words "moist" and "panties"

I am also not very partial to the words slacks and blouse and I absolutely hate it when people say space when they are talking about anything other than having air around them or the solar system. I don’t love the word sink and would replace it with basin every time even if it was not correct and I would never ever utter the word hankie, I would rather wipe my nose on my sleeve. Honestly.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t have a problem with the word panties (although I know a lot of you  just dry retched just then) but it was the most common word we gave to female underwear in South Africa where I grew up, so it sounds natural and normal to me.

But there are a whole host of words that I can’t say in public, not because I can’t stand the sound of them,  but because nobody other than my immediate family would know what I was talking about – like smoosh is ice cream that has been softened, and leeanza is lasagna and lawt is water.  Long stories with rich histories that make the words sound perfectly normal around the family dinner table but quite insane to the bystander.

Johanna Gohmman wrote in a hilariously funny article in Salon recently:

When I was growing up, my family developed our own unique form of communication. This kind of makes sense, as we are the size of a small Sioux tribe — I have six brothers, one sister, and 13 nieces and nephews — and while our language may lack the majesty of the Sioux, it is nearly as voluminous. We call ice cream “beluga,” a remote control a “mocha” and bathing “souping.” Partly this can be attributed to my father, who loves wordplay, and will happily address anything or anyone with gibberish. He found his children’s early attempts at speech hilarious, and he held onto our garbled words, encouraging the mispronunciations.

However, there is little doubt that a big part of our family’s special language can be attributed to my parents’ minor Freudian hangups. They absolutely abhor “bathroom words.” They share such an intense aversion one wonders if this wasn’t what united them to begin with.

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” He’d wink. “And maybe later, we’ll have a baseball team’s worth of children?”

“Why I’d love to!” My mother would flash her blue eyes, discreetly adjusting her bouffant.

“Excellent.” My father smiles. “Oh, and by the way, I hate all words related to the excretory system. Maybe we can make our children hate them too?”

“Wonderful!” My mother beams.

Maybe my father was disgusted at his children’s names – what other reason would he have to refer to my sister as Frog Face and me as Lana Banana Cabana Beach Pie ?

Are there words that you simply hate the sound of and are there words that you or your family have replaced?