On dreefees, pinos and takelos

In David James Duncan’s The River Why one of the more interesting characters (in a book filled with interesting characters), young Bill Bob Orviston, has a gift for language. He invents the word dreefee to describe “some carefully selected relic of the day’s adventures” to focus on as part of an elaborate bedtime ritual. Matthew had a real gift for coinage when he was little. I used to write down some of the words he invented. An early one was moodoo-scoodoos: I’m not sure what he meant by this word, maybe he just enjoyed the sound of it. He also called adults redults—suggesting that we are all retarded in some way—and referred to his favorite fruit cantaloupe as canvelope,an interesting way to describe a fruit enveloped in a hard skin. Two of the more lasting words were takelo and pino. A takelo is one of those soft erasers shaped in the form of an object, often an animal, that were popular gumball machine treats in the 1980s. "I lost my takelo" was a common expression in our house years ago. A pino is a neat place to hang out. The original pino was at Boops and Pepys's house on the Western slope of Colorado, a comfortable place on the haystack with a spectacular view of the mountains where Matt and his friend Wilson used to hang out. Matt was 3 years old at the time. In later years Rachel used the word to describe the indoor forts she built out of sheets and pillows.