When my brother finally rode his bicycle - without training wheels - from our house to the corner and back, he came home with the grinnies. Anything can bring on the grinnies - just so long as one feels great delight. The term caught on, and it has been an important word in our family now for two generations. When Rose was about four, she started explaining her funny look by saying, “I have the grinnies”. Her younger sister, Rose, who had deep dimples (酒窝), often expressed her pleasure with such a grin that the dimples appeared to become permanent. The term originated in my mother’s family. Sometimes, when life seems just perfect, I have occasional attacks of the grinnies for a whole day. Grinnies usually last just a few seconds, but they can come and go. On the inside grinnies are characterized by a feeling of joyful anxiety.

Grinnies are shown on the outside by sparkling eyes and a wide, wide smile - not just any smile, but one that shows the teeth and stretches the mouth to its limits.A.person experiencing the grinnies appears to be all mouth. And it is really lucky to have the grinnies, an uncontrollable, natural state of great pleasurE. Naturally, I was delighted, but I didn’t know I was attracting attention until the teacher spoke sharply, “Helen, what are you doing?” Called suddenly out of my happy thoughts, I said “Oh, I’ve got the grinnies!” The teacher and my classmates burst into laughter, and then I understood that grinnies were used inside my family. One day the teacher returned compositions, and there it was - a big fat, bright red “A” on the top of my paper. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote every composition until I convinced my mother that I could make no more improvements. So nightly I spelled words aloud and answered questions about the fine points of grammar.

My last report card had said that I was a “C” student in English, and my parents, both teachers, decided that no child of theirs would be just an average student of anything. But it was my homework which led to my discovery that grinnies was a word not known outside my family.

So far as I knew, it was a word like any other word - like bath, or chocolate, or homework. After all, everyone in my family used the word quite naturally, and we understood each other. Until I was twelve years old, I thought everyone in the world knew about the grinnies, if I thought about the term at all - which is unlikely.

He will become a laughter and a byword