You Say Potayto and I Say Potahto

Man-friend?
Mon amour?
Husband-elect?
What the hell?

I need to buy a French-English dictionary. I can assemble a few meaningful syllables and even if I don’t get the meaning exactly right it would have to sound more sophisticated in the form of a French inflected bon mot.

I look at the online French translation tool (there is something for everyone on the internet!) and I put in the word “boyfriend.” Then “lover.” Then “partner.”

Squat-tah.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

Is there a Sniglet dictionary? There ought to be.

I am wondering if there is a useful word in the urban lingo dictionary app that Scott’s daughter has on her Smartphone.

I have to get my hands on that app. I should have asked her about it that night at dinner when she looked up something for us. But I was too stunned to make any competent observations.

We’d been sitting at the table at a restaurant Scott selected for dinner. I’d offered to take him and his girls and a tagalong steady boyfriend to dinner for his birthday. We were chatting all at once and making quite a lot of noise for such a small group, when I distinctly heard someone utter the word “wenis.”

The table fell silent. Scott and I leading the way in the speechlessness department.

Wenis?

Could that be what it sounds like? It sounds like a Sniglet-esque word combining the formality of “penis” with the playfulness of “weenie.” So maybe a tween would tell someone to stop acting like a wenis and be completely appropriate (in certain middle school lunch study hall circles…)

I am sure I am blushing. I look at Scott. He is struggling to form words. Did his daughter really just remark to her boyfriend, while she abruptly pulled her hand away, “Eeew I accidently touched your wenis!”

Girls! We are in public! And at the table!

All three kids are looking at us like we’ve gone mad. Not an ounce of guilt. No reddened faces. Not on the boyfriend or the one purported to have touched his wenis.

I am having a moment of oldness.

Scott says, “Did you just say “wenis?” What is that?”

His younger daughter rolls her eyes and says, ‘Dad, everyone knows what your wenis is. It is the skin on your elbow that hangs loose when you straighten your arm!”

Oh everyone knows, do they? Everyone under 21 perhaps, but I have the arrhythmia to prove that not everyone knows that your wenis can be completely and legally exposed in a public place.

We must have looked flabbergasted because while one daughter argued the other pulled out her phone, clicked on the urban dictionary and produced a selection of definitions, all in support of the elbow skin connection.

There was one that admits that the word sounds really funny and sort of dirty. Nice to know I was not imagining things.

I am going to download that app and search for a word for boyfriend…that perhaps some teenager has made up to describe the fogey currently fulfilling the role for his or her
own divorced mother .