Thursday, January 18, 2007

Family Languages

I remember once meeting a family with several children, mostly daughters. They argued with each other a lot (shocked me since I come from a mostly quiet introvert family) but they were quite close, too. They mentioned once that they had their own “family language” and I remembered it up till this day because up till then I had just taken for granted that we, my family that is, had a sort of accelerated etymology evolution process for words in our family. I hadn’t even thought that other families might have a similar language process. I just hadn’t even thought about it at all.
Just one to illustrate my point: my little brother called airplanes “daddies” because when he was very little my dad often travelled to the Alaskan bush for clinics and the like. We remember one time that my mom tried to teach my little brother to say airplane properly. “Air-plane,” she said carefully, enunciating the syllables, and he looked back at her and replied equally carefully and distinctly, “Dad–dy.”

So the reason I am writing this is because in my last post I gave a link to a pdf of our visual schedule cards, and then just now I noticed how easily a family word had crept in there without me even noticing it. Until I edited it Cool I had the instruction: “do expert” with an icon of a dishwasher. “Expert” is a family word of very very ancient origins; when my second child was about six or seven and I was just starting to get the older ones involved in family chores, he loved to unload the silverware part of the dishwasher. He is very visual/spatial and I think he must have gotten some kind of organizing input that he needed, as he sorted the silverware and deposited it in the proper places in the silverware drawer. He was so proud of his ability to do this, so he called himself an “expert” and the name stuck as a job description. Back then we had the dishwasher unloading broken down into sections because only my oldest was tall enough to put away the stoneware. Also to make it easier for them since they weren’t used to doing household work, and the whole dishwasher seemed overwhelming (it was overwhelming for me and I was a grownup; I didn’t mind loading the dishwasher but I absolutely dreaded unloading it). We still break down the unloading into separate jobs though different children do it now. I suppose that means my kids will go out into the world only able to unload the dishwasher as a component part of a team.

Another example from our chore language system:

  • Child: Who are you today?
  • Second child: I’m Bob Hope
  • Child: I’m Jerry Lewis.

This is because we have a family tradition of naming our chore rotations. We rotate weekly in sets; each set has been dubbed by the kids as a kind of shorthand. Before I revised the chore rotation when my oldest went to college, the jobs had names of actors from Lord of the Rings. I think we had Sean Bean, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortenson, and Peter Jackson. Now they are old comedians…. the job set names, not the children.