No more nieces

I was pondering the other day on how you should refer to your nieces and nephews as a whole - ie with a collective noun. I think I may, for possibly the first time in my life, take Bert's advice and try to invent my own word and try and get it into proper widespread usage. Quite ambitious, but no harm in trying.

When inventing a new word, I think it works best if the word starts from current words and expands on them. I'm going to take a cue from Adam Roberts. In his book, On, he uses a system for family members which typically start with a root related to a currently used part-word, followed by a "he" or "she" to denote the male or female. For example, parents are "pas", the male parent (the daddy!) is a "pahe" and the female parent (the mummy!) is a "pashe".

I don't think I need to go quite so far from current usage. I suggest the following:

1. Nephews stay the same and are called "Nephews".
2. Nieces become "Nepshews"
3. A collection of Nepshews and Nephews (Nieces and Nephews in the old parlance) are now just called "Nephs". Maybe this technically should be "Neps", but "Nephs" sounds a bit softer so I'm going to run with it.

So, now, I have two nephs - one nephew and one nepshew.

I think this actually works quite well and I'd encourage all of you to start using it as quickly as possible. Together we can improve our langauge.

Now, I realise it's emminently possible that someone else has already tried to instigate this usage. I did check Google though, and didn't get any usages of "nepshew" apart from a few instances where it looked like "nephew" had just been typed badly.

The only outstanding issue is pronunciation. Should it be Neph-she-ews or Nep-shoes? I think I favour the second one...