What terms have you made up that stuck?

In ASL, yes I have made up several. I made up an ASL sign for O-o and now a lot of people use it. In English, I made up “foowee” but I don’t know if it caught on :D

I haven’t but my sister and her husband basically created the ESL dialect used by deaf people in Ghana. There were several enclaves of deaf that each had their own language, they took bits of them all and created a common language that is used between the enclaves.

“Living the dream” I said at an old job. The workplace had particularly low morale.

People would say “How you doing?” and eventually people would respond with a grim “Living the Dream” or “Living the American Dream” throughout the firm.

Flunking – fluthering while drunk.

@WestRiverrat WOW that is SO cool!!!!!! I’m intrigued!!

Swimming means happiness among my group of friends. It is just an inside joke about how excited I was for swimming when we all went to Florida together for spring break. Swimming wasn’t happiness for the one who got bitten by a fish in the ocean, though.

For instance, “Was it swimming?” means “Did it make you happy?”

“The date was not swimming.” means that it did not make them happy, although “not swimming” has kind of evolved to mean atrocious or horrible more than just unhappy.

Not exactly ingenious, but it is fun to confuse people.

I got caught having sex (mom came home early, damn it!), while I was also baking a cake, which had burned to a crisp because I was too busy having sex. Thereafter, sex was known as ‘burning the cake’ for several years among my friends.

A friend and bandmate of mine had a landlord named Desnick. One day we were rehearsing for a gig and she picked up a little piece of fuzz that had landed on her guitar. G*dd#mn desnick, she said. From then on, all of us called little pieces of lint “desnicks.” The lead player even bought a small fuzzy puppy whom she named Desnick. Thirty years later, we all still use the term and the people who have been close to each of us over the years have adopted it as well.

A different band mate misheard a reference to LED lights on a piece of equipment and thought the speaker had referenced the “diddly-dee lights.” We still call them diddly-dee lights.

My ex hated clutter. When she would go off about anything she deemed to be clutter, it would start an argument. I don’t know what self-help/fix your relationship book she read, but one day she referenced all the “happy stacks.” I looked at her quizzically, busted out laughing and we worked through the issue for the first time. I still call them happy stacks (I still have them and she is an EX!)!

When my brother was little he found my mom’s tampons and asked what they were. She told him they were “camping supplies.” That’s been the word for anything feminine in my family for 27 years now.

Also, my brother and I talk online a lot, and instead of saying “no thanks” once, one of us wrote “not hanks.” We started saying “Not Hanks” instead, both online and not. It then evolved to simply stating a movie that did not star Tom Hanks. “Want to grab some pizza?” “Pretty Woman.”

@WestRiverrat That’s a pretty awesome story!
@augustlan That is an epic term XD
@sliceswiththings Not Hanks sounds hysterical to me! lol!

I said lolz, and my friends followed me. I also called Facebook messaging, “inboxing”, and so did everyone.

We have a lot of funny words in the family. Probably every family has those: euphemisms, nicknames for things, and terms that refer to family inside knowledge and in-jokes.

Outside the family there’ve been a few in the workplace. One that I can think of came about because I used to work for a company whose owner’s initials were CR. Some things just couldn’t happen without his okay, and when he signed off he wrote “CR ok.” I began referring to that mark as a “crok,” and in time the noun evolved into a verb: “You need to get that crok’d.”