Funny Words

A live post to track amusing anecdotes from my kids as they learn about or abuse the English language. They just turned 9 and 6, so most of this should still be rated E for everyone. If I’m still updating this 10 years from now, that rating may change. For now, it’s still amusing when the kids walk through a Gustav Klimt exhibit and laugh uncontrollably while saying “I see nipples”. If there’s an official age when this type of behaviour becomes inappropriate, please let me know.

THE WORDS

2022

Butchery – We were driving around the city when my son suddenly asked an odd question: “Daddy! What’s a butt cherry?”. I chose not to answer that one right away and instead inquired “Why do you ask?”, to which he replied, “We just passed a butt cherry store”. I was not aware of such a store in the neighbourhood, so luckily my daughter saw it too and clarified that it said “butchery” and I was far more comfortable answering “What’s a butchery?”
Titmouse – Sometimes we play a game with the kids where we take turns naming things that start with each letter of the alphabet. One day, the topic was birds, so when we got to “T”, I remembered a bird from my childhood that made me giggle and said titmouse. They didn’t believe that it was a real bird, because it does sound more like a rodent, so we looked it up and all learned more about different titmice like Cyanistes caeruleus (the blue tit) and Parus major (the great tit). Now, they have a new T-bird in their vocabulary.
Wenis – The kids came up to me one day and asked me to straighten out my arm. I did. Then they started pinching the loose skin on my elbow really hard and asked if it hurt. It did not, and I learned something new. The kids learned this from an episode of Teen Titans Go where this loose skin was called an Eebow. Due to excessive pinching, the Eebows rebelled, leaving people unable to bend their elbows and subsequently being unable to brush their teeth, eat, or wipe their bums. We wanted to find out if eebows were real so we asked Google: “Ok Google, what is the loose floppy skin under your elbow called?” The answer was “wenis”. Officially the olecranal skin, but the kids only remembered wenis, because it’s much funnier. We’ll probably be hearing that word used inappropriately around the house a lot more now.
Fuku – While doing groceries, my daughter ran up to me all excited and dragged me over to the soy sauces. She then pointed out the word “fuku” on one of the bottles and asked me how it was pronounced, smiling with anticipation. To her disappointment, I told her it was pronounced Foo-Koo.