Baby talk that's been promoted to real talk?

When I was a toddler, I'd apparently ride my father and say "Gibbit, Dave!" They figured out that gibbit was my baby-talk for giddyup. Oddly related, I heard "yeah mule" and reproduced it as "yeah mewdle". Both of these stuck as occasional replacements for "hurry up".

My son is now 31 but a few artifacts of his baby-talk still live in our family lexicon: mushroom is sometimes "mupper", yellow might be "aldo", olives are "awbers", and a wash cloth could be a "quash-wash".

My daughter pronounced guacamole as "grockamomily" for just a short while, but we sometimes use that. Also, her first word was down, but not just down, "dowwwwwn" so we sometimes say down like that.

There are others that have drifted in from friends or more distant family. If I call a helicopter a "hoecopper" or bologna "bony", my wife knows what I mean.

What about for your family?

An interesting (at least to me) aside is that Garrett was an incredibly precocious talker and it's easier to come up with a list of his cute baby-talk words and phrases. Kivi started talking at a much more normal age and had fewer of those. I bet that's a cause-and-effect thing but I don't have a large enough sample.

No baby talk here, though I had a friend when she wanted a favor she would say

`Will you do me a Flavor` instead of favor ...

I still struggle pronouncing the word Library as it has always been a "Lie-Berry" sense I was a tot.

Anne Miller wrote:No baby talk here, though I had a friend when she wanted a favor she would say

`Will you do me a Flavor` instead of favor ...

I've heard that one from several people throughout my life! I just asked my husband about it because I know he has said it. He thought it was from an old ice cream commercial but I couldn't find it.
I did find:
- Ellen DeGeneres does a game with her audience called Do Me a Flavor where they guess if an ice cream flavor is real or not.
- Lay's is doing (did?) a campaign called Do Me a Flavor where they asked the public for potato chip flavor suggestions.
But I feel like I've heard it all my life, which dates back before those 2 things.


My son had trouble saying "K" so words like cookies and doctor kit came out as "too-ties" and "dot-ter tit"
I'd get to see a good laugh (or a suppressed one) when I'd send him over to a guest to say "do you want to play with my dot-ter tit?" and they'd have no idea what he meant.

He also couldn't say refrigerator for a while so sometimes I still might say "fridge-ee-ator" to him.

Oh, and a pharmacy we'd pass by when he was learning to read was called Peter Pan Pharmacy. He'd say Peter Pan "Price-mary". So sometimes I'll say price-mary instead of pharmacy.

my little brother couldn't say my name for a while and called me "Noony" instead, that stuck for longer than I liked!!
He also couldn't say fire truck and instead said "Fire f*ck", which was absolutely hysterical (for me as a 12-year-old) until we all got in trouble, and even now gets a laugh if anyone brings it up.

when i was young my mother took in her elderly aunt to live with us. She was old fashioned and weird, in my opinion as a smartass kid, and had some real unique words. she said "anticues" for antiques, cue-pons for coupons, reseeps for recipes and, my favorite, oinkment for ointment. There were probably more. Laughing at the way she talked was a recipe for getting sent to bed without supper so I held it in but a few years ago (many years after she was gone) my mother and I had a lot of laughs remembering some of her gems. (she remembered many more than i did)

Kim Wills wrote:He also couldn't say refrigerator for a while so sometimes I still might say "fridge-ee-ator" to him.

Oh, that reminds me that I said "free-idger-ator" as a little, but it didn't stick for whatever reason.

Tereza Okava wrote:...and had some real unique words. she said "anticues" for antiques, cue-pons for coupons, reseeps for recipes and, my favorite, oinkment for ointment.

I sometimes play with anti-cues as an alternate pronunciation, but it also doesn't stem from a child mistake. And if I'm understanding you right, "cue-pons" (or maybe queue-pons) is how I say that word and the most common alternate "coup-pons" sounds weird to me. Oinkment is fun!

Antiques reminds me of another one, though I was much older (9, I think) -- the first time I saw the name Albuquerque on a highway sign, I mispronounced it Alber-quee-quee and I now sometimes do that on purpose to be silly like Tereza's aunt. (which is pronounced ant )

I think I've mentioned before that I didn't realise till I was a mature person that 'tats' doesn't mean going for a walk to most people. My Mum says it comes from saying 'ta-ta' for goodbye. But we take the dogs for tats, or ask people if they fancy a tat even now (my husband has caught that one from me!)

We have quite a few, based largely on my daughters. My son was surrounded by adults, and spoke like one - in paragraphs - by the time he was 18 months old. My oldest daughter, on the other hand really struggled, so we have waterlemons, instead of watermelons; yipskick instead of lipstick; moggies instead of monkeys; gah-hees instead of cookies, and others.

My youngest was the most fun, though, because as soon as she said something wrong, she knew it didn't sound right, and she'd keep working on it, until she got it right - then occasionally she'd playfully use her own mispronunciations and laugh - even just a couple minutes after she figured it out. From her, we have squares, instead of squirrels; Wally Weird instead of our previous Wally World; Dufus instead of Joseph (she was learning my friend's newborn's name), and when something smelled or tasted good, she'd say, "want more smells good!" or "want more tastes good!", until we gave her the name for it - which is how we ended up with pew-fume, instead of perfume, from her grandma and mice cream, because she separated 'some' wrong, and dropped off the s, o, and e, in 'some ice cream'.

My step daughter heard her mom say "I have to pee so bad, my bladder is going to burst", and for a long time, thought surely her own "platter" would do the same, so that one stuck, too.

I love these kinds of words!  Probably the one I say most often comes from one of my nieces.  From when she was 3 or 4 to when she was about 7 she called a hotel a hoe and tell!  And I still call it that and I always will!  I think she was getting it tangled with show and tell somehow.

Love this thread. My current Fav from #1 Grandson is 'Lolola! Lolola!!' (Granola

Family is Everything.

Kim Wills wrote: My son had trouble saying "K" so words like cookies...

With my eldest, it was the letter "L". We were on a road trip with my mom, and she told him she'd brought him a present, "a whole box of L's!" He had them down within an hour - didn't want to disappoint his favorite Gramma.

None of ours got promoted, but the one that got comments:

My sister gave us a picture book called, "Alice the Tugboat that Sneezed." Being a tugboat, her sneezes were written, "Ah-toot, ah-toot."

When I was trying to teach my son to blow his nose, it wasn't working, until I started to say, "Ah-toot, ah-toot."

Use the tools you have!

Do family nicknames count?

A cousin of mine was the third in line with a name passed from grandfather to father to finally him. He would be referenced as "The Third" commonly until his younger sibling started to talk. She had some difficulty with her speech and would instead call him "The Turd".

This guy has grown into a fine man and is now employed as an emergency medicine physician. He still is referred to as "The Turd" by the family.

A bit different from baby talk, but I have heard say that the old regionalism for chimney here is “chimbley”. Apparently that’s a common enough dialectical form but I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

M Ljin wrote:A bit different from baby talk, but I have heard say that the old regionalism for chimney here is “chimbley”. Apparently that’s a common enough dialectical form but I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

I knew I heard that somewhere! Took me a while, but I found it in print. In How the Grinch Stole Christmas!!
Here is me, my actual self, reading it on video to send to my granddaughter a few years ago. I thought Dr Seuss was just taking liberties rhyming it with "nimbly"; I mean, he outright makes up words. But I guess it was a "real" word! I'm glad you mentioned it!

Fast forward to 5:00 for the page with the "chimbley".