Our Language of Love Is Nonsense

We make up words, the more absurd the better. Trust me, it's romantic.

Just a few days ago, out of the blue, Sara commented lightly to me, “You know, we don’t need to do anything for Valentine’s Day.”

God, I love this woman!

Like me, she has no room for the scripted expression of emotion that is called for on Valentine’s Day, Sweetest Day, Administrative Professionals Day, Teacher Appreciation Day, and all the other Hallmark Holidays.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a “language of love.” In fact, our language of love is nonsense.

Do you have a language of love?

Now, I’m not saying that having a language of love is nonsense … not at all. This whole “5 Love Languages” thing, kicked off with the book by Gary Chapman in 1992, holds that each of us understands that we are loved in different ways, and that a great way to get in synch with your partner is to understand and speak their “love language.”

The book that started it all

Today you can take the online quiz and buy a whole bunch of “love language” products and services at the website.

Typically I find this type of stuff to be horse shit. But Sara and I read the book, we took the quiz, and we both learned a lot about what the other person needed.  

Our weird language of love

But this “love languages” thing missed our essential love language: nonsense.

Our love language sounds like this:

• “Let’s rub bobby flappers,” I say to Sara (this made Louisa blanche until we explained that all this meant was “give me a kiss,” since the “bobby” is a face and “flappers” are lips … Don’t roll your bobby poppers at me!)

• “Don’t farparle me!,” Sara yells from the other side of the house. (To which I reply, “I’m not farparling, you are!”)

• When I smell something burning I sing out: “Crazy woman, why do you burn toast?” (Only I say this one, and only to the person I call “crazy woman green trees” after a campground we passed in Gillette, Wyoming.)

• Where do we stop for a snack on a road trip? A “mood fart,” of course. (That’s just a favorite example of litching sweaters, which has endless variations.)

• Our favorite place to go for a walk is “Vetucchio.” You won’t find it on a map. (Another favorite place is “HorseSex Road,” but that was named by our friends Jeremy and Sara.)

We do call each other the conventional pet names–stuff like “sweetie” and “babe”–but we prefer oddities like Slimper McGee and Lumpy Skins and Lacey Goofbottom. We used to call each other “lovey,” until we heard my mom call her husband Lee that, at which point we abandoned it in favor of “lowry,” a misreading of a label on a Christmas gift one year.

And speaking of Lee: he introduced a couple gems into our repertoire, including “laser flare” (”He had a real laser-flare attitude,” he’d say of someone who just let things be) and “flap-poo” (as in, “Oops, I committed a flap-poo”).

Of course our kids got wrapped into this little secret language too. They know when we call them “kichifitas,” it’s meant with love, as is not revealing any “layoverfermeddlers” before Christmas or birthdays. And “zoop zoop”? That’s mom urging them to get their butts in gear.

When Louisa was little, she’d say something gave her “the goneys,” but when Conrad asked what that meant she’d look away and say, “nothing.” We never did figure out what she meant, but whenever we’re not sure how we feel about something we say we’ve “got the goneys.”

When the kids were very little and having a hard time going to sleep, I’d put the kibosh on them. Kibosh, of course, is a real word, but in our lexicon it had this very special meaning: it was a spell I cast to put them to sleep. Once they figured this out, they’d ask me to put the kibosh on them all the time, but I wasn’t some on-demand kibosh machine and, I told them, it was a superpower that I could only deploy when it was really needed or I’d wear it out. In this way, they learned to put the kibosh on themselves.

Sara’s mom, Carole, once asked us if we were going to teach our kids any real words. But we didn’t feel like we needed to: they understood our nonsense language of love.

Who you calling kichifitas?