“Daddy’s Big Little Nintendo”

November 5, 2018 4:49 PM

A List Of Weird Names Luke Plunkett's Kid Calls His Video Games [Kotaku] “You and I, as adults, know to call things by their actual names. My kid is four, and does no such thing. For reference, he’s been playing some of these systems and games for around 18 months now. Which is why, despite now being a four year-old kid who can actually do a fairly good job of speaking like a human being, he persists with his cute lil’ baby names for the systems and games he was familiar with back then. They’ve stuck, and I just don’t have the heart to correct him, because there is nothing better in the world than hearing somebody be convinced a game is actually called “Mario Build It”.”
posted by Fizz (26 comments total)

For a large portion of my childhood life I called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NESS) and I still mostly do. And we also know that this is the correct way to pronounce it, so even as a child I just inherently knew.
posted by Fizz at 4:53 PM on November 5, 2018

“Daddy’s Big Little Nintendo”

The best/worst leather bottom nickname ever.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:56 PM on November 5, 2018 [13 favorites]

Thanks to a friend's niece I will never stop referring to Netflix as "Neckflips."
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:09 PM on November 5, 2018 [18 favorites]

I've been playing games with my 4-year-old son for the last couple of years. He calls Saturday "Great Day" because that is when the two of us would hang out and play on the WiiU, go to the park, and do other fun stuff while his mom takes his sister to Japanese school. Even though he started going to Japanese school this year he still expects to play on the WiiU when he gets home because it is "Great Day".

We play a pretty limited selection of games and he calls them all by their proper names. On my phone I have a game, Pokemon Shuffle, that he calls "Pokemon Shuff". I have no intention of correcting him on this.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:24 PM on November 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

My son did a lot of "the one with the [noun]" where "[noun]" was not always the most salient point of the game in question. Risk of Rain, for example, was "the one with those white ghosts." (The Parent enemy type apparently made an impression on him.)

My favorite was Spelunky, which he referred to as "the one with the man who wants to eat all that butter." (Gold bars, to a three-year-old mind, being such objects of desire, could be nothing but butter, which he was endlessly frustrated that he was not allowed to eat whole, by the stick.)
posted by Scattercat at 5:28 PM on November 5, 2018 [24 favorites]

super nintendo chalmers
posted by poffin boffin at 5:37 PM on November 5, 2018 [23 favorites]

Street Fighter II: “Street Fighters [punches air]”

Can confirm this is the correct method of pronouncing.
posted by symbioid at 5:54 PM on November 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

Also I can't wait to see what he calls Little Big Planet series.
posted by symbioid at 5:55 PM on November 5, 2018

My son, who is 8, calls King of the Hill "Howdy, Neighbor" in that when he comes downstairs in the morning, he knows he is not allowed to watch Cartoon Network when Howdy, Neighbor is on.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:13 PM on November 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

My niece knows that they visit Costco on trips to Chicago. She calls the city “Chicostco.”

My younger brothers used to mispronounce a few words. Contact lenses were “concacks.” Yogurt was “yogrit.” Superman was “Booberman.”

My wife and I now regularly use the words yogrit and concacks. I only just recently told her about Booberman for the first time last weekend. I do not think Booberman will be entering our household dialect.
posted by compartment at 6:18 PM on November 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

Friends were anglophone family living in Montreal, dad, a musician, named Frank. Kids called his sax the "Frank-o-phone". Just. So. Perfect.
posted by chapps at 6:28 PM on November 5, 2018 [8 favorites]

Some of our friends had a kid who was obsessed with the Wallace & Gromit shorts. They were, in his vernacular:
* Doggie Moon (Grand Day Out)
* Doggie Pants (The Wrong Trousers)
* Doggie Sheep (A Close Shave)

He is now old enough to drive a car. I think I prefer Doggie Moon to this day.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:00 PM on November 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

I apparently picked up the concept of cooperation from Mr Rogers, but not the pronunciation. So the next time lil' thecjm was told "No" by my mother, I responded by saying, "let's carburetor."
posted by thecjm at 7:16 PM on November 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh and I not only manged to call Knight Rider by the name of the main character, but I also manged to mispronounce that name too. So I would get very excited whenever "Micro-Knight" was on.
posted by thecjm at 7:25 PM on November 5, 2018

Thanks to a friend's niece I will never stop referring to Netflix as "Neckflips."

My niece called “Corn Pops” “porn cops” and that was never not funny.
posted by greermahoney at 8:16 PM on November 5, 2018 [13 favorites]

My middle son saw Inside Out when he was 3 or 4 and called it "Brain Monsters." The first time he asked to watch "Brain Monsters" it took me a while to figure out what movie we were talking about. But, no, totally apropos, little dude!

He also thinks the singular of "clothes" is "clo." I'd say "Go throw your dirty clothes down the laundry chute" and he'd say, "But mommy! I have just one clo!" He is now 7 and appears to still think this is the case and I am just holding my breath to keep that one going as long as possible.

My oldest called my stand mixer "cement mixer" for the longest time, and whenever I mixed anything, he'd stand there shouting with joy, "GO CEMENT MIXER GO!"
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:12 AM on November 6, 2018 [11 favorites]

He also thinks the singular of "clothes" is "clo."

The clo is a unit of insulation.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:26 AM on November 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

The little boy who sat near my wife and me at that little Italian place and babbled excitedly about his plate of "Freddy Al Chino" probably graduated from high school this year.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 7:54 AM on November 6, 2018

A (possibly somewhat beer-impaired at the time) friend of my sister's referred to the thing that turns the TV off and on as the "Vermont Control". This has spread throughout the family & is now considered totally normal. As in "Give me the damn Vermont Control already!"
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 8:53 AM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

My younger daughter liked Dora the Explorer and thought her name was D-D-D-Dora, like the theme song, which was pronounced like Dunta Dora. We still call her Dunta Dora. Also grilled cheese is 'girl cheese'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:47 AM on November 6, 2018

Aw haha, this reminds me of my high school BFF's little brother with whom we'd play Yo-yo (Mario) and Nink (Zelda). He really niked Nink.
posted by sunset in snow country at 9:53 AM on November 6, 2018

The Vegetables, my daughter said "girl cheese" when she was little! We still call it that. She also said "gray-bee" for gravy and "rib-er" for river.

My son, however, had the best mispronunciation of all time, which I managed to catch on video, back in the day when that meant hauling out the video camera. He said "f"s for "s"s for a long time, so "socks" were "focks". He had "sh" down, so when he would ask for his "socks and shoes," it sounded like a sweet little three year old was demanding his "fuck 'n shoos".
posted by cooker girl at 11:53 AM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

My daughter gave the world "startastic" and "chill down".
posted by BeeDo at 12:55 PM on November 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

When my kids were very young (3 or 4) I didn't let them watch violent video games like Unreal Tournament, but one day I had downloaded a bunch of new deathmatch maps and was just taking a look at them, walking through the empty maps, which, of course, are all arenas that loop back around on themselves. I let my daughters watch some of this and one of them said "How you get out?" and they started calling it "The How-You-Get-Out Game."
posted by straight at 2:48 PM on November 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

My son is the champion of mis-re-naming things. The restaurant Flame Broiler became Hot Grill when he couldn’t remember the name. It’s not Mac & Cheese, it’s Goldfish Noodles. There are more...
posted by sleeping bear at 7:38 PM on November 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

When my granddaughter was about 3 she was fascinated by construction workers and obsessed with a cracker from costco. She also didn’t have a lot of hard consonants and had trouble with Rs. Hence my everlasting enjoyment of riding around town with being placated with “car snacks” because pointing out all of the worxing guys made her hungzies for craxies. To be fair they were kinda addictive.

Oh and she could spot a playground slide anywhere and remembered them all. Running errands was a litany of toddler babble punctuated with WHEEEEEE!s whenever we came within a block of a slide. I honestly don’t know how she saw and/or remembered them all. I like to think that maybe her intense fascination with them dimpled space time in a way that was palpable if only one knew the way to sense them.

She’s 8 1/2 now; ever so wise. I wonder where the time went.
posted by mce at 5:05 AM on November 7, 2018 [3 favorites]