“Would you like a coffup?”, I once asked my partner.
Rather than offering to cough up money I owed him or some bizarre hot drink concoction, I was actually asking him if he’d like his coffee topped up from the machine.
While he was initially baffled, it became a mainstay part of our lexicon along with “goosedrop” and “pie-and-pants” to describe our cat whose name is, uh, just Wash. Nothing to do with pie or pants.
Now that I’ve let you into the weird world I share with him, it’s time to look into exactly why we and many other couples do this.
If you think you’re too cool for this, just know, we all know you do it too.
Why we make up weird words and phrases with our partners
Interestingly, this is more than just being a little weird, it’s actually a language variant or dialect called “failect.”
Obsessed.
Cynthia Gordon, an associate linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family spoke to The Atlantic about this phenomenon and said: “Any group of people that has extended contact over time and sees itself as distinctive is going to have some specialised uses of language,
“Listening to recordings of other families is like being immersed in a different world.”
There really is no feeling like home, and when you have a shared secret language, home can be anywhere as long as you’re together. This is true for partners, friends, and family.
A study looking at the use of idiosyncratic terms among couples found that personal language nurtures a feeling of closeness and actually can play a part in attempts for connection and even reconciliation.
Gordon added that this language can be exactly what we need to reinfoce memories, rituals and stories, saying: “Every time they use that phrase, they are pointing to all the previous uses of it.
“It reaffirms their ‘familyness’ in a way. It re-creates their relationship.”
Ah, humans. We’re lovely sometimes, eh?