Am I the Only One?

 

Am I the only person who...

...gets a little thrill out of color matching (with or without trying) such as the hanger to the garment on laundry day, or the chip clip to the snack bag's prominent graphics on any day?

...kind of hesitates to throw the first piece of trash into the wastebasket after replacing the full garbage bag with a new one, not wanting to mess up the clean look?

...thinks that the McDonald's workers may actually be trained to slap the slice of cheese at an angle one-third off the patty when assembling a fillet of fish sandwich for the customer? 

...has separate and distinct pronunciations for the words hock and hawk?

...sometimes silently shares an unsolicited tip with someone on social media: proofreading is a marvelous writer's tool (eliminates calling your elderly friend a dear old soup, for instance)?

...likes to end a full-course meal with eating a little bit something salty yet?

...tries hard to avoid touching a picture of a spider or snake? (especially its head) (especially if its fangs are bared) 

...gets a runny nose from eating hot food (both from spicy hot and temperature hot)?

...collects malpropisms and other fun/funny word stuff? (Who will steerhead it? They came to a stallmate)

...overuses parentheses?

...thinks you should comment on this blog post and tell me one of your quirks, (or unique habits, if that description suits you better) since I told you some of mine? 

Oopsies, Whoopsies, and Other Day-sies

I have no idea how the little "oopsie-daisy" phrase got started. While I like the sound of it rolling off my tongue, I don't like its connotations. It means something probably got up-ended or someone pulled a blooper. 

Like the oopsie I did to myself the other day when I walked into the wrong bathroom at school. I have subbed at that school often enough to know exactly where the upstairs staff ladies' washroom is (and no, I don't mean that our school has a laundry room) but I was in such a hurry to get outside to help tie second-graders' skates at recess that I opted to use the downstairs student girls' restroom instead. 

In recent (I think) years, the school basement washrooms have been renovated, so I was in somewhat unfamiliar territory as I approached. I thought I looked at the woman's picture on the sign outside the door before entering, but what I gave it must have been a blurry glance. 

Because I soon discovered I was NOT in the right room. My first clue was seeing a bathroom fixture designed for a gender not my own. I made a hasty exit out of there, being very mortified as well as very grateful that I had only met something and not someone. 

Just when I thought I'd be able to manage the short hall to the ladies' room and slip gracefully and unobtrusively into the right bathroom without anyone's notice, I met a student - a male third-grader - on his way to a correct bathroom. I knew he could not have missed seeing me come out of the wrong one. 

He could've done any one of a number of things, such as never met my eyes in passing while pretending he never witnessed my blooper, smirked broadly behind a hand he'd cupped over his mouth, or outright guffawed at the substitute teacher who was ditzy enough to sail into the wrong restroom.

But he didn't. The bright-faced young chap looked right at me as he came near, broke into a friendly grin, and chirped, "That's okay, these bathrooms got switched around."

It's true that the boys' and girls' restrooms are opposite of where they used to be, but that fact really gave me no excuse to not read the signs properly. I think it's noteworthy that a third-grade boy offered  me the excuse anyway. 

I'm sure he had a funny story to tell his family that night at the supper table, but I also have a hunch he treated me kindly in the telling. Kudos to his parents for teaching their child to respond to others' oopsies with grace. My guess is they're being intentional about it or modeling it well. Probably both.

Oopsies, also called whoopsies, come in varying degrees of impact. They can have way more serious consequences than mine had, but they can also be merely a spontaneous switch in plans that ends up being just as fun or special as one's first intention or expectation. Or perhaps they are simply an alteration that your smartphone makes to a word that you type in. The result can be surprising, maddening, humorous, or so intriguing that you continue to use the new expression just for the jolly of it.

Such was a whoopsie that my daughter Kayleen encountered a few weeks ago. Having received a pic of the whoopie pies her sister had procured as a snacking option, Kayl replied to Kerra's phone message by saying how yummy the snack looked, and that she'd been wanting to make whoopie pies herself sometime soon, too. Only, her phone (clearly having never been treated to whoopie pies in its lifetime)  auto-corrected it to "whoopsie pies". 😀

That's why, when I helped Kayl make actual whoopie pies last week, she referred to them as "whoopsie pies". We had such fun working together to make the whoopsies in her kitchen that day, mixing the chocolatey batter, baking the brown rounds on the cookie sheets, matching up the equal-sized cookies lying cooled on the table, spreading the whoopie goop on half the cookies, topping them with their matching unspread halves, pressing them together into cookie sandwiches, wrapping each chocolate sandwich cookie in Saran wrap, and visiting all the while. The finished "whoopsie pies" weren't whoopsies at all. They were some of the moistest, tastiest whoopie pies I've ever had. 

In searching for the origin of the oopsie-daisy phrase, I came across the idea that it began with people exclaiming "Upsa daesy!" when helping a child to leap up from the ground in play. Though our oopsie-daisy phrase has derived from the upsa-daesy exclamation, we've given it a different meaning. We use it as an expression after a trip-up or other mistake, usually exclaimed aloud by the one who did the messing up. We tend to shorten the phrase too, with merely exclaiming, "oops!" or "whoops!" as accompaniment to our latest blooper. 

The "daisy" part of the original phrase, though, is a kind of fancy add-on to "day", and maybe comes from picturing the "upsa-daesyed" child being on the ground among daisies. I was fascinated to find that the name daisy comes from the word day..."the flower, which closes at night and exposes its yellow center in sunlight, was thought of as the day's eye." 

 I guess I wasn't so far off, then, when I added "day-sies" to the title of this post. It seems like one way to describe the sharing of some happenings in my life lately. "Other day-sies" in recent weeks include:

~ babysitting my great-nephew, who is not only great but cute and charming besides

~ travelling to South Haven, Michigan to support our friend Bear by attending the funeral of his 91-year-old mother (and getting to meet Bear's twin brother for the first time)

~ sharing Sunday dinner and rousing conversation with some of Ken's family around our dining room table

~ subbing for Kerra at school two different Fridays, while she attended weddings of former Faith Builders classmates 

~ sewing two new dresses for myself which happens only about once a year, hence the remarkability

~ our friend "Debbie" treating us3@home to a Swiss Chalet rotisserie chicken meal

~ hosting an Oasis Ladies gather-n-chat time here one morning when four ladies showed up as well as that many children and a good time was had by all

~ Ken and I going on a week-long trip: to Pennsylvania where we separated for a few days - he to an apple conference and I to Kayl & Carlin's house - and where we got back together again at said house (also enjoyed a tour of the house-in-renovation) and to New York where we vacationed for a few days in a rental condo overlooking Canandaigua Lake, hiked on a lovely & snowy mountainside, cooked our own meals, and played lots of Boggle (which we claim is loads of fun and our children just roll their eyes)

~ Ken and I doing Wordle together and usually getting it in 3 or 4 tries, but once we got it in only 2 and once we couldn't even get it in 6 (oopsie-daisy!)

 How have your day-sies been blooming lately?

FamilySpeak

Right up front, I'll tell you this post is not as serious as the ones in my latest blog series, nor is it as impacting a post as our current pandemic situation warrants. Perhaps you should read it only if you're needing a brief and inconsequential diversion to help you ward off claustrophobia, or put off closetcluttermustgobia, or some such.

Okay, now that my disclaimer is out there, here is where the real post starts:

I suppose one of the things that causes the in-laws in our family of Kenites the most eye-rolling is the way we say words in weird ways around here.

This often happens at the table. We say things like "I'll take the VANilla eye creams" sounding like we want some sort of balm for the headlights on our van when all we really wish is for someone to pass the vanilla ice cream as opposed to passing us the Cookies 'n Cream flavor.

Or we might mention something about having "some of that snake, too" which everyone knows means the family member addressed may leave the box of crackers and the package of cheese slices out on the counter as snack options for other family members to partake of, and in no way refers to sharing reptile appetizers all around.

We have various ways of weirding our words. Often it involves changing the vowel sounds - flattening the curve of the breve to a macron, as it were, over the vowels in a word, or the other way around. That's how snack becomes snake, and reach can be pronounced retch. (Gross, I know!)

Sometimes it's spoonerizing a phrase (or is that roonerspizing?) such as calling a bunny rabbit a runny babbit. Or when you want to go take a shower, it's just as easy to tell someone "I'm gonna go shake a tower."

Other times, the words we use sound similar to the words we wish to say, but they actually add a bit more meaning, such as how you feel about the texture of certain foods. Saying squish for squash is a classic example in this category.

Occasionally, a certain term will come into our family's use because of a mistake someone made with a word, and then that misused word becomes the norm. An example of this is when we call lunch, lancha, referring back to a time when we were in Guatemala on a family trip. A Spanish fellow wanted us to buy tickets for a ride in his boat (lancha), and one of our family members thought the guy was talking about lunch, so he replied, "No thanks, I just ate."

Sometimes we think the accent of someone is intriguing or endearing, and so we copy their way of saying words once in awhile. In this regard, ketchup may get pronounced as ketchoop, cereal gets said sir-yull rather than seer-ee-ull and a wolf becomes a woof.

Why do we do this? For one thing, we can't help it. I think this word-wackying, so to speak, is hereditary. Our children probably picked it up from Ken and me and before that, the two of us probably learned the art from our families of origin. I know I inherited the gene from my dad as much as any of my relatives. He's famous for word-varying, especially with names. Among his grandchildren for instance, Ricky became Rickles and then Wrinkles, and Heidi was referred to as Heidi-go-squeaky.

I wasn't surprised when my children began showing signs of word-changing capability among themselves because pronunciation-altering was common among me and my sibs as I was growing up, too. Again, phrase enhancement seemed to concentrate in the kitchen. I remember that for us girls, wipe the table became wip the tabloid. Wipe the highchair morphed into whip the hitcher. Such craziness!

Why did we do it? For one thing, it added interest and pizzazz to ordinary objects and tasks. For another, we were learning skills to hone over the years and pass on to the next generation - no matter where you are, no matter what the amount of potential boredom around you, no matter how much you lack entertainment equipment, you can always use your brain to play games. You will never run out of options with words.

But now, I'm wondering if we were/are just weird. And if so, are we alone in our quirkiness. Recently Kerra asked if we are the only family to say words wrong and I join her in the questioning.

Are we?