FAMILECT, n. This is a linguistics term for language used and understood only within a family or intimate group. Linguistics has a bunch of these words, like “sociolect” (language used and understood within a social group) and even “idiolect” (language used and understood by an individual). Familects, in particular, tend to be made up of words or expressions that outsiders find incomprehensible. The invented words often come from things children say—a topic we’ve discussed in previous newsletters, like this one on “calm up” and the follow-up where I shared some reader responses with more words and expressions from kids—but that’s not a requirement.
Your family or friend group probably has plenty of these; if you have a named group chat, that’s an entry in your familect. (Some friends are in a WhatsApp chat called “JoeJoe’s Bargain Chattery,” because my frugal beloved, called JoeJoe by our friends’ kids, pleaded with us to stop running up his pay-as-you-go phone bill with group SMS texts.) If your family or friend group has particular words and expressions that are meaningless to outsiders, or indecipherable nicknames, or call-and-response rituals (when I was a child, every time I asked my grandfather what was for dinner, to my horror and delight, he answered “cods’ eyes”), those are part of your familect, too.
A few readers generously shared examples with me, so I’m including those here, along with a few from my own extended family. (Some people get into genealogical records, but I keep a list of our familect.) The rarest type of entry is an entirely new word. My in-laws, for instance, refer to a [kunu]—written in the International Phonetic Alphabet because I’m not sure of the preferred spelling—which is a small plastic food-storage container, so named by my brother-in-law decades ago when he was a child. My friend and fellow romance writer Amy Jo Cousins wrote to me:
My family has a word we use that I don't think I've heard anywhere else. Boudgy? Boodgie? No idea how it would be spelled, but it's got the vowel sound from could/would/should in the middle, so bŏŏ-jē is the pronunciation maybe? If I've copied the accent stuff properly! [Ed. note: she has, though I made a small change that will hopefully allow the characters to show up in more browsers and email clients; this is American Heritage Dictionary notation.] It means thick, warm, and snuggly. As in, I had a sweatshirt made from a padded quilt in high school that was extremely boodgie, or curling up on the couch in front of a fire in a thick blanket is boodgie.
Isn’t that wonderful? Sometimes a neologism really does sound like its meaning. These examples, [kunu] and bŏŏ-jē, are also the most obvious in their quality of “nobody outside our family says this” (or even knows what it means). And I love, like in the case of bŏŏ-jē, that sometimes a familect word or expression is as much “etymology obscure” as anything in the dictionary. Another reader, Caroline, sent me this:
My family has a phrase “Captured candid!” that we say to each other, usually with multiple repetitions and a over-the-top cheeriness, when someone’s taking a photo that they want to look natural, but it isn’t really working. The phrase definitely originated with my mom, but I don’t remember exactly when or how, but it always makes my cousin and I in particular laugh out loud.
I love the kind of formal, ritual aspect of a lot of familect entries: things we say only in certain circumstances, words and phrases imbued with extra meaning by their context. Often they’re allusive, and my favorite is when they allude to a family story, like this one that a reader, Sarah, shared with me:
The other (I think) very excellent familect entry comes from my early teen years, when my mother was putting away the groceries and narrating her finds. She'd purchased chocolate milk (a serious indulgence in our household, rare because it was never on sale, and also was considered dessert), and in an effort to appear cool and above my younger siblings' simple tastes, I professed my general disdain for the drink. A few hours later, at the dinner table, there were four glasses of chocolate milk, and at my place, a glass of water. My younger brother had been responsible for setting the table, so I asked (probably in a somewhat accusatory tone) why I hadn't been given any chocolate milk. Most sincerely, he replied that he "didn't want to oppress me", since I'd been so clear about not caring for the treat. To this day, "to be oppressed" or "to oppress someone" has a particular meaning in our familial conversation, not really translatable to the outside world.
You can just feel the sibling energy in this, I love it. And it really requires its origin story in order to be comprehensible to an outsider.
These shorthand expressions and shared customs, little shibboleths, accumulate when we spend a lot of time with the same people. They’re often silly, but they’re loving, too. And I would bet that “I love you” is one of the most frequently transformed phrases. A friend once told me that every time he dropped his kid off at school, he would say “don’t forget that I love you,” and eventually he shortened it to “don’t forget,” so now that’s what they say to each other. The kid in question is an adult now and needs no dropping off at school, but that doesn’t matter. Don’t forget.
My own household version is more convoluted. After watching, and being frustrated by, a number of TV shows where two characters who had long needed to sit down and talk about their feelings finally had a scene together doing just that, often culminating in an “I love you,” only for one of them to die shortly thereafter, their emotional business concluded, my beloved and I took to saying “you and I have unfinished business” as one of us leaves the house for the day. Meaning: don’t die. Meaning: I haven’t yet said all the things (I love you) that I need to say to you. Like many things we do, it started as a joke and slowly shifted into something more like a ritual. Also like many things we do, it’s bizarre enough that many reasonable people find it troubling after they’ve patiently tolerated the explanation. (Apologies if you find yourself in that camp. You’re in good company.)
It’s been enough years of calling “unfinished business!” out the door that I can no longer remember the particular TV shows that inspired this tradition. We used to say it in an exaggerated, significant tone, like a poorly acted line of dialogue, but now we say it any old way. So some of its original context had faded, but this is still what we say in my family when we mean “come home, I want to see you again, I love you.” When my kid is old enough to understand language, will I need to explain to him why I tell him that our business remains unfinished when I drop him off at school? Or will he, with a native speaker’s intuition, having heard me say this near-nonsense to him and his father countless times, already know?
(Okay, let’s not kid ourselves—with this inscrutably weird phrase, it’s definitely the former.)
I started writing about some romance novel characters who express their love with words other than “I love you,” but this newsletter is already late and very long, so I’m saving those paragraphs for next time. (Until then, Charlotte at Close Reading Romance assembled her own lovely collection of examples in this post.)
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
I am not reviewing titles published by HarperCollins or any subsidiary because the HarperCollins union is still on strike, and they have requested a review embargo. If you want, you can help out by signing their open letter in solidarity or donating to their strike fund; use the link above.
Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots (gay m/bi m, both cis, historical) by Cat Sebastian. I don’t think I’ve ever read 1970s Manhattan as a setting in a romance novel and it’s always so refreshing to see a writer dig into a different place and time. Daniel is a dirtbag with a heart of gold, a freelance music critic going to clubs and getting in fights he can’t win, illegally gardening in the abandoned lot next to his crumbling apartment building, sleeping with his two married best friends at the same time. Alex is a neurodivergent (probably autistic?) pediatrician running a low-cost clinic and he likes everything just so: “Alex hoped Daniel appreciated exactly how bold and daring he was being in going to the store on Tuesday rather than Saturday. It was like fucking Mardi Gras over here, everything upside down.” The two of them are best friends who spend all their time with each other, but are not “together,” and the book is about their gradual renegotiation of their relationship, and what it means to be in any relationship. Examining romance from this angle is so queer and so satisfying—Daniel and Alex don’t want marriage or children, and maybe they don’t even want to share an apartment. They commit to each other with such care and specificity. They both have loving families, biological and chosen, which is a quality of Cat Sebastian’s work that I cherish. This book is all vibes, no plot, which isn’t what I want to read all the time, but at the right moment, it feels very cozy. Content notes from the author.
Ocean’s Echo (gay? m/bi m, both cis, sci-fi) by Everina Maxwell. Before I read this, I saw many social media posts extolling the morally upright, rule-following, ace-every-test main character, and yes he is darling and absolutely deserves to be adored, but I personally am here, now and forever, for the cause-problems-on-purpose horrible goose main character, as an archetype and also in this specific incarnation, as Tennalhin Halkana, nephew of an important politician, possessor of feared and illegal mindreading powers, and lifelong colossal fuckup. There’s a sequence where Tennal attends crew meetings on a spaceship and subtly undermines everyone’s suggestions just enough that nothing gets done and everyone squabbles. I love him. I also love the trope-laden sci-fi premise here—mindreaders can mentally bond (“sync”) with another person who then has access to and control over them, permanently, a fate that Tennal’s Machiavellian politician aunt would love for him, but that he would not love for himself. What’s a horrible goose to do but convince his morally upright, designated sync partner that they should fake it? Delightful. Also some real good cosmic weirdness in this. Content warnings from the author.
Mentions of pregnancy and reproductive trauma in this next section.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Nghi Vo’s fantasy novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune. I hesitate to throw around the word “masterpiece,” but… I genuinely think this might be a masterpiece? It is incomprehensible to me how ancient and rich and textured the world of this story feels, how real and alive its characters are, and yet how short it is. (I know I say that about a lot of short fiction. It blows my mind every time. But this one especially.) Every sentence carries so much meaning, but the whole thing just flows.
Anyway, like When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, which I discussed previously, The Empress of Salt and Fortune has a frame story, in which traveling cleric Chih and their talking hoopoe Almost Brilliant collect oral history for the abbey of Singing Hills. Chih and Almost Brilliant go to Lake Scarlet—mysterious, glowing, definitely haunted and possibly malevolent—to visit a house where the Empress once lived in exile. It has been locked up and gathering dust since her reign began, but now that she has passed, the site is open again. At the house, they find Rabbit, elderly handmaiden to the deceased Empress In-yo, who tells the embedded story that reveals some secrets of the empress’s life. In-yo was a foreigner sent to the emperor as a tribute wife after he defeated her people. She was lonely and disrespected and abused in the capital—after giving birth to a son, her child was taken from her and she was sent into exile (and forcibly sterilized). In exile, she befriends Rabbit, a peasant girl who has also been wronged by society’s disregard for women, and the two of them rebuild their lives and gradually remake the world.
I love the way the embedded story unfolds, punctuated by Rabbit’s refrain “Do you understand?”, as the secrets she reveals grow heavier and heavier in their impact. Longtime readers of this newsletter will know that story-within-a-story is one of my favorite things, as is anything adjacent to an epistolary novel or any kind of “found documents,” mixed-media approach, and in this novella we get to see Chih’s notes as they catalog the contents of the house. They read like a caption at a museum: “Astrological chart of the constellation of the Crying Widow. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for ‘mourning.’” These glimpses of material culture are such a clever way to establish the world—what things look like and are made of; what people keep, value, and discard; religious and cultural symbols; writing systems—but also the story, since these particular items encode secrets. (Full disclosure: my next novel has this kind of “catalog of objects” device in it, which, honestly, how embarrassing for me.)
Empress In-yo and Rabbit are both constrained by their roles (as women, as empress and handmaiden), by their exile, and by the surveillance from the emperor, and still they find ways to communicate the messages necessary for the coup. They use and subvert all of these constraints on their way back to power, and the objects, many of which are explicitly feminine or frivolous (robes, make-up, jewelry), tell such a story of their life together, but one that can only be understood with careful, attentive deciphering.
And, God, it’s so angry. This is a story about women’s rage, and it’s so good. I couldn’t have handled reading this in the aftermath of my various pregnancy traumas, and honestly even now it was tough, but I stuck around because the writing was so beautiful and because I wanted to watch In-yo fuck shit up and emerge triumphant. It did not disappoint.
Happy 2023, Word Suitcase readers! I will continue my thoughts on romance novel characters and individual ways to say “I love you” in January, which is the next time I’ll be in your inbox. You know what that means? Our business remains unfinished.