My wife Rikka and I were on our honeymoon in Scotland when the phenomenon first showed itself. We were out walking and it was coming on to rain when Rikka said ‘Get the glubicles out’. I thought this must be a Danish word (Danish is her first language) but she assured me it wasn’t and was surprised by the fact that I had no clue what she was talking about. ‘The glubicles’ she said, looking at me as if I was stupid - ‘in the rucksack’. By looking through the contents of the rucksack and linking it with the falling rain I finally deduced the meaning of the mysterious word. ‘You mean kagoule!’ I said, holding one up. ‘That’s what I said,’ she replied, ‘glubicle.’ It was her conviction that this was the right word which fascinated me; the word sounded so right to her that it was not questioned, so much so that she expected me to understand it too.
Strange words and phrases appear like this every now and again to my delight and Rikka’s bemusement (what did I say? What’s wrong with that?) Of course there is nothing wrong with Rikka’s words at all, in fact there is a lot that is right with them. As well as being funny they are often they quite brilliant in their inventiveness; but it is not a studied cleverness- Rikka’s brain absorbs certain words and sounds then mixes them up and regurgitates them in these new forms quite spontaneously. When I analyse the new word or phrase and explain its derivation (where possible) she laughs as much as me at the playful creativity of her sub- conscious mind.
I started to collect these words and phrases in a little book and began to realise that they fall into different categories ; some of them (like glubicle) bear no relation at all to the original words which they seek to replace. For example, if I’m asked to buy some goobies – I know it’s passion fruit that Rikka wants, if a Sticky Long John or a Moolibar is pointed out on the floor I will no longer be confused, I will look for a Daddy Long Legs or a woodlice!
Another category are the word amalgams- two words fiendishly welded together producing the combined feeling and descriptive power of both. So a pleisurely walk is both leisurely and pleasurable, a bookshop which is buzzling is busy and buzzing with people and the word scissateurs reduces fancy sounding secateurs to what they basically are - scissors for the garden .If I tell you that a stinch is a repugnant smell you can probably work out the derivation yourself.
Some of the words are malapropisms which, along with their comic value, actually add some descriptive element to the word. For example a person who looks after your feet is a chopadopodist, a banging match suggests the explosive nature of a particularly lively slanging match, a lotopomy indicates where a lobotomy would be carried out (top–o-me) and a tatoonist gives a nod to the kind of drawing a tatooist is doing. Some of her malapropisms come out rather sweet- a Cyglet is a baby swan, pigling a baby pig, a peritwinkle is named after the flower and a twit is a small bird.
Some Rikkaisms, though made up, seem to need no explanation- you can perhaps imagine how you would feel if you were bemuffled, or ditherly and the phrase ‘the women were guffling down cakes’ might conjure up a clear mental image to you.
There are also whole phrases which get turned around, mangled and reinvented and are particularly good at indicating states of mind. An annoying person will drive my head up the wall, a sudden surprise will cause you to declare; ’I’m shocked out of my guts’, a state of nervous exhaustion is described quite eloquently by ‘my nerves are dangling’, and when you’re really at the limits of your endurance you can cry out ‘I’m at the width of my tither!’
Language is a living thing, new words are evolving all the time - every family instinctively comes up with its own word for the television remote control (perhaps because there never seemed to be any official word for it); a German au pair once told me her stomach was coming upstairs after a bad curry eaten the night before. I hope you have enjoyed this round up new words which are evolving round our house. If you want to see the full list of Rikkaisms click here.