Families have their own languages.

For example, I recently spoke these words into my wife’s voice mail: “Hey, Baby, I’m sitting here in Bernard with Bobadoo II. We’re at the stinky-chicken corner. We’ll meet you at the Thomas playground in three minutes.”

Translation: “Dear wife, I’m riding in our Toyota sedan with our younger son. As I speak, we are passing the poultry processing plant. We will be at your location in three minutes.”

As parents we pick up scraps of language from our kids. How else do you explain all those 60-year-old couples still calling each other “Mom” and “Dad”?

The other day, one of our best young reporters tried to tell me that “dethaw” is in the dictionary — as in: “Honey, dethaw the chicken.”

“Dethaw is not a word,” I told her.

“Well, it’s a word in my family,” she insisted.

My “people” in middle Tennessee used the word “wrench” in an odd way. My father would say: “Wrench out that wet wash rag.” For years, I thought he was mispronouncing “rinse,” and I prayed he would never tell me to “wrench” something in front of anyone smart.

Now, as I think about it, he was actually on the verge of proper usage. He meant to literally wrench (or twist) the wash cloth.

I encourage all young couples to appoint a family scribe to be the keeper of funny stories and made-up words, especially if they plan to have kids. (It’s important to keep it in a book — don’t trust a computer file.)

We have a little spiral notebook at home with a red leaf on the cover. We keep it on a kitchen counter. Every time one of the boys says something fun, we run for the book.

I have an entry I need to record. Our 2-year-old decided one morning this week he would sing to me.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Immediately, he lifted his little chin and sang: “Jesus loves me, and this I know: Bingo was his name-o.”

His older brother, now 7, doesn’t like it when I flip back a few pages in the family quotations book to recall some of his early-childhood gems. He once invented a holiday called Valloween. He still occasionally calls a fire hydrant a “fydrant hydrant,” and Crayons in our family will forever be known as “crowns.”

While writing in the quote book this week, I noticed an entry from four years ago this month. My older son, then 3, had informed me that he needed a new seat for his bike.

“If you haven’t noticed,” he said, turning around and bending over at the waist, “my bottom has grown.”

Do tell.

If you don’t write this stuff down, it will be lost for eternity. Or as my older son once said as he inspected a quarter that I had dropped on the floor: “Losers keepers, now you got the weepers.”

E-mail Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com