Coinkydink Coincidence

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sundance Brennan.

Hi, Sundance. Welcome to the show. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, Texas. What’s up?

Well, I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, and she couldn’t pronounce the word coincidence. And so she said something that sounded closer to clinky-dink.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, so I tried to coach her into the word coincidence and mentioned, well, maybe we just say clinky-dink. And then my wife overheard, and she’s wondering, like, well, are you teaching our kids fake words?

Fake words.

Fake words, right?

So then the question comes up, well, this word, I guess, is slang. At what point in time does a slang word become a real word? And is that a regional word? Because she didn’t seem to be as familiar with it as I was. And I thought everybody knew what Quinkity meant.

Oh, that’s funny.

I’m surprised, too, because I think it should be in every mainstream dictionary.

It isn’t. Yeah, it’s surprising, right?

It’s what we call an intentional malapropism, you know, when somebody just goofs with a word and makes it something that it’s not quite exactly. Like defolgety for difficulty, skidooly for schedule, that kind of thing. And you can find coinkydink in newspapers back to the 1940s, and I have no doubt that it’s much older than that, so it’s been making the rounds for quite a while.

It sounds like the type of thing that a five-year-old girl would say on accident.

Yeah, it’s interesting. In order to have that pronunciation of the word, though, she has to be familiar with the spelling of it. So I assume that she’s already learning to read.

Yes, yes.

Gotcha. Very good. That’s a pretty big word.

I will say something about the pronunciation coinkidink. There’s a whole category, not just these intentional malapropisms, but saying words wrong on purpose is a thing that many families do just because it’s fun. It’s a goof, and it becomes your in-house or family word because the kid said it wrong or somebody misunderstood or it’s just ridiculous.

In my house, my wife likes to say aminals instead of animals because it’s a common metathesis, the transposition of the sounds. I say family because that is, for some people, a dialect pronunciation of the word family, and I just like the way it sounds. Like chimbley.

Chimbley, yeah, or library is what I sometimes say wrong on purpose, even though I know it’s not correct. And I find, too, that this happens to me a lot with texting, too. If I misspell a word, then I’ll start using it.

Is it because your phone keeps re-suggesting it?

So anyway, yeah, these words, mispronunciations are common. For it to become ensconced in language, though, to formally show up in dictionaries, it has to have a lot of legs, as they say in Hollywood. It really has to be used widespread over a long period of time by a lot of people in a lot of different domains.

And coinkinink definitely is one of those words that appears repeatedly thousands and thousands of times in the written record since the 1940s and no doubt earlier.

So Sundance, how are you all handling it?

Now it’s been a family topic. So we have three small children and the two brothers, she has two older brothers, they will say coinkinink, but almost in a teasing manner. And she still tries to say coincidence, but she doesn’t quite say it correctly. She’s close, though.

That’s charming, though. I like little kid mispronunciations. There’s something adorable about them.

Yeah, and any excuse to talk about language with your kids, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Well, cool. Thank you, Sundance, so much for calling us. We really appreciate this. And let us know what the little cuties have been saying next, all right?

Yeah, edumacate us.

All right, will do.

Thank you both.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I’d love, by the way, to get these intentional mispronunciations from everyone. We know you’ve got a bunch of them. Just share them out, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or put them on Twitter and we will retweet them like mad. Our handle is Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.