The family’s language
Originally published in August 2005, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
It’s untelling how many peculiar words and phrases we Powells have adapted over the years. A lot, maybe. I happen to have a few minutes of privery, so let me pour myself a piece of water and share a few.
First, I’ll go back a bit to Granny Powell, my father’s mother. Granny is unable to commit to stating even the simplest thing as unqualified fact. So, if I asked her something like, “Granny, where are the fried apple pies you made this morning?” her answer would be along the lines of, “They might be on that plate on the kitchen counter.”
This is a woman who has faced – and continues to face – some serious hardships in her life, so it’s possible a certain timidity came from that. This is too bad, but it’s also probably part of what inspired her loyalty to her children and grandchildren.
My father (who could never be accused of being timid) grew up in her house, and I’ll bet her example is part of what inspired him to never fear saying exactly what he means … occasionally including when he shouldn’t.
Dad and Mom are my source of the phrase “it’s untelling,” which means the same thing as “there’s no telling.”
I presume they acquired this phrase in their hometown of Hazard, Ky., but I didn’t catch on to its uniqueness until years after I’d moved out on my own.
Nowadays, I don’t ask about “untelling” for fear of making my parents overly conscious they’re saying something few others would. If that happened, they might stop doing it, and I don’t want that.
For the same reason, my wife and I will probably never correct our 4-year-old when she uses the words “lasterday” (yesterday), “lasternight” (last night) or “lasterweek” (last week).
Lisa and I couldn’t point to the moments these words were created, but we flat adore them. I’m serious, these “laster” words our daughter created, for whatever reason, are musical to us and we’d be delighted if she never stopped using them.
We know, though, it’s only a matter of time before she catches on, the way she caught on to the fact that it’s commonly accepted to state a mundane “I’m cold” instead of the more colorful “I’m brrr-ing” she used for so long.
Luckily, she continues to refer to the hospital as “the Popsicle,” a name she created in her first couple of years. These days, however, she does it as a joke.
Our younger girl is about to celebrate her second birthday and her vocabulary grows by the second. Sometime in the last few weeks she started asking for “a piece of water” when she’s thirsty. She’s also taken to saying “I do” or “I don’t” in place of yes or no.
Once again, Lisa and I love these developments.
There’s so much we save from the people in our families. The letters, pictures, drawings, toys and some of the clothes will be around a long, long time, ready to be taken out of storage and admired anytime.
But we slowly lose the sounds of our loved ones; lose the quirkiness shaped in their vocabularies as they grow up and out of it, or as they grow old and out of touch with their surroundings.
We often don’t even recognize these kinds of changes until long after they’ve happened. Some of the quirks in our kids, I’m sure, came and went so quickly and subtly we didn’t even have time to appreciate them before they were lost.
Just last week, my older girl asked for a few minutes of privacy and a little bit of my heart broke. Not because she didn’t want me around, but because she used to call it “privery.” I’m gonna miss that word.