a blog about #wordplay

With very short exceptions, my parents have had cats for as long as I’ve been alive. My nuclear family is close and has plenty of words, phrases, or family references/in-jokes¹ that I took for granted growing up. When I was in middle school, my at-the-time crush came over around my birthday because she had gotten me a present.² She was allergic to cats, so she had little-to-no concept of cat behaviors. While we sat on the couch, I tried to explain what the cats were doing and why, using as specific of language as I could: the ones I learned from my family. She responded that those words weren’t real, and I explained that my family always used these words. It then dawned on me that families could create common-sounding words that were actually extremely niche.

Many years later, I’ve since learned that all words are made up. With that in mind, here’s a descriptivist approach to my family’s words for describing cats. Where possible, I’ve tried to include any known etymology I could in the footnotes:

boonk /bʊŋk/ verb — a cat intentionally hitting its forehead on anything ³

smear /smiɚ/ verb — a cat rubbing either…

Tonight, I finally got to meet friends from cohost @tsiro (richard), @bcj, and @thricedotted (li) in person, along with their friend Mouse. I had a great time filled with a lot of laughter. One of the topics brought up was the online conference that bcj and many of their friends partake in, involving 5-to-10-minute presentations. When it became my turn to talk about a presentation idea, I mentioned the following means of counting familial relationships as my most-recently-workshopped bit that I believed I could stretch to 5-10 minutes.

In a family, each and every person is related by a linear combination of the following two characteristics:

• Blood
• Law

Blood

When two people are related by blood, that means they share “blood relatives” linked by nuclear family: biological parents (1 step up the tree), biological children (1 step down the tree), or biological siblings (1 step over on the tree). We can determine the number of blood steps¹ for other specially-named relatives too, like great-grandparent (3 blood steps up), cousin (1 blood step up, 1 over, 1 down), or nephew (1 blood step over, 1 down). In each case, we aim to produce the shortest path between the…

A few years ago on cohost, I (re)invented the idea of applying “baker’s” to any quantity to refer to one more of that quantity. A baker’s dozen is 13, a baker’s half-dozen is 7, a baker’s score is 21, etc. The etymology of the phrase mentions adding a 13th loaf of bread when selling a dozen, to be on the safe side. This “rounding up to one more” could be applied to any quantity, so I’m surely not the first person to consider it.

Last night, I was imagining applying the opposite of the “baker’s” prefix, to indcate one fewer of a given quantity. I had originally come up with “swindler’s,” but my friend mentioned that it wasn’t specific enough of a profession. To keep with the idea of “skimming one off the top” and to minimize the Levenshtein distance between the prefixes, I proposed “banker’s.” A banker’s dozen is 11, a banker’s half-dozen is 5, a banker’s score is 19, etc.

It turns out that banker’s dozen is already a phrase in Australian English, which may just push me personally from “fun in-joke” to “actually adopting and spreading the phrase whenever possible.”