Waffle Cornflake And Other Family Words

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We heard from Wendy Stanton Westwood in Fredonia, New York, who wrote to us about a project her mother Barbara undertook during the pandemic. Now, Barbara Stanton is 96, and she spent the last few months compiling a list of words and phrases that their family used growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.

And Grant, the Stanton family lexicon, as she calls it, is 33 pages long.

Wow.

She sent us a coffee.

And it’s really fantastic. Some of the words are childhood misunderstandings, and some of them are intentional mispronunciations that just kind of stuck around.

One of their relatives owned a traveling circus, so there’s a little bit of circus slang in there, and games that the family would play.

And it’s just a lot of fun to have kind of a fly-on-the-wall view of a whole family growing up during that period of time.

Let me just give you a couple of examples. Instead of saying New Mexico, they would call it New Mixing Bowl, which I think is really cute.

And one of their neighbors used to refer to the broadcaster Walter Cronkite as waffle cornflakes, so they all adopted that, you know, time for waffle cornflake.

After dinner. They also referred to the new room. That’s the name of the family room that was added to the back of the family home back in 1960. But of course, it’s still called the new room, which happens in families, right? Right. Oh, it reminds me of Pont Neuf in Paris, which is by no means new anymore. It’s hundreds of years old. No longer new. Here’s one more, Billy Onsen.

Billy Onsen was the name of one of the boys’ imaginary friends. And once the dad went on a business trip and mailed a postcard from Billy Onsen to the kid, and the kid was really confused about getting a card from his imaginary friend. That’s a great prank.

Something like that happened in my family, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.

Oh, that would be a lovely story to hear, Martha. Every family has its own language. That’s just the way families work. Why don’t you sit down and record a lexicon of your family, and while you’re at it, you can share it with us. You can send it to us, words@waywordradio.org, or go on our website at waywordradio.org and find our contact page, and there’s lots of ways that you can reach us.