No, it is no typo. This is one very versatile word in my family's personal and growing vocabulary.
My family, have passion for laughter. One of their talents, and joys, is remembering sentences, sayings, and miss-pronounced words and creating our own proverbs and sayings.
Today's word is "7ajafaan". This is pure family heritage. It's not even a word! Yet we say it so often, that it is part of our daily vocabulary. We share it with our friends and relatives. It's also a sort of passcode that when any one of my family hear it, they will know you are part of the family. Sort of get's you in the circle.
And the story for this word happened way before I was born. During a gathering that included my uncle, many others and a very old man having a heart problem. The old man did not look well that night and was asked what was wrong. He said "Madri, yumkin 3indi 7ajafaan fi al qalb" 7ajafaan instead of khafaqan (pulse). One of my uncles heard it, and loved that word. And so the word was born.
And from that day for anything that is not okay, and the reason is unknown, we say "fee 7ajafaan", or "having 7ajafaan".
Examples.
"What's wrong with your stomach? You don't seem well.". to which you answer. "madri, fee 7ajafaan".
"What's with this program? a bug?" "Yeah, this program fee 7ajafaan".
2 comments:
cool post. I feel like I heard this word before. Maybe from you!
It's quite common for families and friends to have and use these kind of special words and some get so famous that they get into the public domain. Like what you just did with 7ajafaan. I'm kinda encouraged to write about Sok'sojeen. One day maybe :)
Cool. We tend to the the same at home but instead of new words being born, we pick on each other and call each other names. One of the stories I have is at some point in my dad's career he got really interested in Visual Basic, so he attended a few courses here and there.
At home he kept on asking and wondering about the language, so, unfortunately for him, he did that while the whole family was present. As we tried to make a joke out of his initiative we called him Rezgate, as in "Bill Gates". Rez is because his name is Reza (A.Redha)
My dad's so cool that I can just go home and tell him "Hi, Rezgate"
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