Investigating Kitchen Table Lingo PDF Print

Dr Kristyan Spelman Miller and Dr Carolin Esser from the University of Winchester explain where the Kitchen Table Lingo words come from

As users of language we have an open invitation to be creative, to invent totally new words, to play with existing forms to create different meanings, to combine and recombine parts of words we already use. Kitchen Table Lingo shows how creative we are when we need or wish to be. Most often we are creative when our existing resources fail us: either when we have difficulty retrieving a word or expression at the moment it is needed, or when our existing repertoire lacks the specific expression we want. There is a surprising number of words in the collection, for example, which refer to 'remote control,' an everyday item, but for which the manufacturers' approved term (the 'referent') often seems to slip from easy recall.

Creativity also stems from a desire to amuse or entertain: being playful with language allows us to be original and to move beyond the predictable. Whatever the reason behind our productivity, we tend to do so in fairly principled ways, following certain linguistic processes in the formation of new words.

'All change!'

One of common ways in which new words are produced is through a change in form (that is what the academics call, morphological transformation). One example of this is blending, which is the joining together of parts of two words. Commonly this may involve the beginning of one word being combined with the end or beginning of another; for example, sharth (a shower with a plug in to transform it into a bath); visipants (purposefully visible underpants); moobs (male breasts); screeper (car screen wiper); mansturise (a male applying moisturiser); colourbetical (sorted by colour); and in a more complex way, climpers (tongs), possibly a combination of clamp and pincers, and swoop (a cross between stew and soup).


There are many examples of compounds being created from two existing words, such as button box (remote control), snotfair (interview with a student unhappy about his/her grade); snoozy-watch (nap in front of the television).

Other creative forms come from the combination of existing and familiar prefixes or suffixes, such as busherise (to make up words in the style of George W Bush), britoid (foreign, but British-like), fussell (to create a fuss); peglomania (obsessive peg collecting); nigelling (to cuddle up - originally to Nigel), or whimpet (a moany clingy child). Some new forms are clippings, such as rous (disastrous), and remy (remote control), which is a shortened form of 'remote' plus a diminutive.

Sound Effects

The power of sound in the creation of a new word is striking. Associations with the sound of an existing or related word are seen in many items: chobbing (chewing) bibbly (tiddly), bloiky (bloited). It is noticeable that a large number of KTL words begin with plosives /b/ and /p/. Many words are onomatopaeic: buzzy (vacuum cleaner), tinkle tonkles (christmas tree decorations), tanatanatat (cash register), splosh (tea); ponk (to sound the car horn); pinger/ bimmer/ plinker/cajunka (remote); pfot (to open a new jar); shnert (sound made by a happy dog), slother (drag feet). Some may be explained by visual association, such as: chickens (hair standing on end); winky (so sour it makes you blink); scronkle (the way guilty cats move); poddle (the action of a cat kneading on a soft blanket), which combines both visual and sound associations.

Get My Meaning?

In some cases an existing word is used in a new context with a completely different meaning. Shifts of meaning may be more or less straightforward to explain: conch (remote), ostrich (verb, to stall and refuse to open brown envelopes), rat pile (growing collection, particularly of papers), but the explanation for words such as beans (cool), billy (a travel guidebook), cakey (insincere), noodles (greeting goodnight), belm (a lie), chopsin (nagging), clam (idiot), avlexly (lovely), kebabs (internet speed) and so on,  is less obvious.

Say Again

New words can derive from mishearings, such as nonge (entrance fee - for dosh), bic-a-bonnet (sodium bicarbonate), and from mispronunciations: wicky (instead of hip pain); tapoes (potatoes); shistlepot (thingummyjig), wazziebazine (washing machine). Children's formations are often particularly creative: Zabazar (pushchair); wallock (mallet for hammering); snerfy (itchy); ritsy (rabbit); pook (round bit on a jigsaw piece; nungy (milk).

'Lend me Your Words !'

Finally, some new words come into use as borrowings: buccapedium (being tactless, from the Latin 'foot and mouth'), vibble (from German wibbeln, onomatopoeic formations for twitching), shifoid (Italian schifo - informal, with derivational suffix); patsches (from South Tyrolean dialect for house shoes, potschen); oom-phoo (unwell, from the Inca language Quechua); nang (from Punjabi 'nanga'); mezza-mezza (corruption of Italian meta-meta, meaning half -and -half).

Such examples provide just a brief taster of the richness of creative talk which constitutes Kitchen Table Lingo. From a linguistic perspective, we see the variety of ways in which we form new words in our everyday communication, whether for fun or to help us in a moment of need, and this provides us with real and fascinating evidence of one of the fundamental properties of language, its creativity.