Words, Words, Words from Barbara Kingsolver

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family's experience of moving to an old farm and eating only locally produced food, including food they grew themselves, for one year. I could never do this because every plant I touch dies, plus no way, no how am I giving up chocolate and coffee, even to save the world. But I completely related to the scene she describes of a walk with her daughter in April after a very dreary and depressing March.

"These flowers are gifts from a previous century, a previous dweller here--a tale, told in flowers, of one farm wife's fondness for beauty and this place. ...[T]he show begins modestly in April with her tiny Lenten roses, white-petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffodils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these were up, poking their snub, yellow-tipped noses through a fringe of leaves.

"'Oh, Mama,' Lily cried, 'look what's about to bloom--the tranquils.'

"There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I'd be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our family, those pink birds with the long necks are called flingmos because of how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother's youngest child--and that was, yikes, twenty years ago."

In our house, we call backpacks packpacks, yellow lellow, pine needles pine noodles, and pianos pinanos. There are others that don't pop immediately to mind. If "you know how these things go," I invite you to share your family's child-induced linguistic fun in the comments.