The legend of Hockamomo
Adventures in the joyful art of butchering teen slang, FR FR
When my wife was pregnant with our first daughter, I daydreamed constantly about her growing up and being old enough to talk. I could not wait for her to tell me what happened at school, at her friend’s house, at the playground, whatever. I have spent my career talking to people to uncover their stories, and hers was the one I most wanted to know. What would she be like? What would I be like? What would we be like?
As the months went on, and my wife’s belly grew along with the baby inside it, my desire for those conversations became almost overpowering. I gave those imagined conversations places and context. She was about 10, and we were standing in a kitchen (though not any kitchen I’ve ever had) and she always had on a black t-shirt. She had blonde hair (which turned out to be true) and was, um, short (ditto.)
All along, I imagined those conversations would be in English.
Silly me.
Then she was born, and she started talking, and I didn’t know what the heck language she was speaking.
I used to think my friends who translated what their kids said were faking it. How did you get that from that? Not anymore. I figured out “payguns” meant grapes. I figured out that she had one word that covered hamburgers and octopus (though how and why those two became one I have no idea). I figured out that “mo-goose” meant either Mother Goose or marshmallow, depending on the context. But context can also be deceiving. Witness the following exchange, which hand on the Bible happened:
Me: “Do you want milk?”
Daughter: “Stepstool.”
There was one word that I never figured out: hockamomo. Hockamomo means something. It means something big, something fabulous, something mindblowingly important. And because she has long since stopped saying it, I’ll never know what that something is. But it won’t be for a lack of effort.
I became obsessed. I turned hockamomo into a song, the sole lyrics of which were, “hocka mo, hocka hocka mo mo. Hocka mo, hocka hocka mo mo.” I tried to break hockamomo down, syllable by syllable. I gave that up as a fool’s errand because she pronounced Jim as Nimanimnim.
Did she like to eat hockamomo? Listen to it? Play with it? Though she could not yet answer or understand questions, I asked them anyway. She looked me dead in the eye. She opened her mouth, as if to speak. I leaned close. And then, in a voice just above a whisper, she said, mysteriously, impenetrably, conspiratorally: “hockamomo.”
So much for my dreams about conversations.
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I asked my Facebook friends about the rise and fall of their own familial dead languages and the thread was funny to the point of bizarre. I discovered almost as many names for grandma and grandpa—Mimi, Nana, Big Chair(?), Hello (??), Morning (???)—as there are grandmas and grandpas. I don’t know how the word pacifier still exists because there doesn’t appear to be a family in America that calls pacifiers by that name.
One friend’s daughter called his stubbly facial hair farks, which he thinks might have been a variation of forks, which perhaps his sharp whiskers reminded his daughter of.
Many children (innocently) turn (innocent) words into f-bombs. Fork sounds especially like that word, and it’s even funnier when a kid drops a fork, points to it, and says, loudly, fork. One friend’s son pronounced Shrek so it sounded exactly like the Queen Mother of Dirty Words, and I can only imagine the look on his Mimi’s face if she asked Junior what he wanted to watch on TV and he said Shrek.
Another friend’s daughter had an entire language he called “Erinese.” Her version of hockamomo was “I shucked me a hahn.” The valedictorian of my high school class never figured out what his son meant by “Salami Dar.” I can offer no help translating it, but I capitalized it because it sounds like the home planet of the next Star Wars villain.
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I have two daughters now, and in about a month, both will be teen-agers. I understand almost everything they say, and what I don’t understand, I delight in mocking. Few things annoy them more than when I intentionally butcher teen slang.
My favorite is “’ship”, sometimes used as “’shipping,” which is short (somehow) for relationship, or more precisely, relationshipping. How that became a verb, and an abbreviated one at that, I have no idea. It means (I think) that the person who uses it hopes that two other people form a relationship. For example, I “ship” (insert two names).
I could have that wrong. Because I always and forever butcher it on purpose to annoy my kids and their friends, I’ve lost track of what it actually means.
I’m a big fan of “sus,” which I think is short for “suspect,” though my parent friends might have made that one up and I’m unaware of it. Whatever the case, I overpronounce it to make whatever is “sus” seem really, really bad.
“Glow up” is another personal favorite, which means to become better looking, or something along those lines.
The other day I received a text from my daughter that said, “Alr ily gn” and I’m proud that in just 47 minutes I figured out what it meant. I was almost as proud as the time my daughter and her friend tried to teach me what “throwing shade” meant, but I already knew.
I don’t know why no cap means no kidding or I’m not lying or whatever the hell it means. But no cap—now that we’re having the conversations I so longed for, I wish they were better. I wish I had more patience, I wish I listened better, I wish I wasn’t so distracted all the time. In my imagined conversations, she always had my full attention. Now that I think of it, she didn’t mouth off in those daydreams, either.
My daydreaming about talking to her hasn’t stopped—it’s just moved forward in time. Sometimes, at dinner, as she talks about, say, what she’s learning in math, I catch myself wondering what she’s going to tell me about when she’s in, say, law school.
What will she be like then? What will I be like? What will we be like? Before we get there, though, we have to survive her teen-age years. I fear that will be seven years of total farking gibberish.
This appeared in slightly different form on a now defunct website. I updated it with the teen slang section. I think that’s a glow up, but I’m not sure, TBH, FR FR.