Manavellins
It's a strange kind of word isn't it?
It's been used by my family to mean "The sort of dish cooked up from whatever leftovers are in the fridge and need eating up".
I thought it must be an Irish dialect word as some branches of my family tree came from there, but no one I spoke to of Irish extraction had ever heard of it!
My husband used it as the name for any Scratch Band he played in for a few years, but no Muso had heard of it either. Was it a product of my deranged Whanau's imagination?
So I decided to try and track it down, and see if the word had ever existed. The first challenge was that I'd only ever heard it, and never seen it written down. Munavelins? Menavellins? Manvaeeyns????
Trial and error eventually tracked the following definition down.
Here's a wonderful blog about the word
"Assorted ropes and equipment". so now I have an explanation for the word, but another mystery. How on earth did it get into our family's vocabulary? None of us have ever had any links with the Sea and the family historian (my Cousin) is no wiser!
So, what strange words are common to your family and rare elsewhere? Any ideas why you use them and others don't?
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