Alphabetter Juice

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Alphabetter Juice Page 6

by Roy Blount, Jr.


  Kooky, meaning eccentric to the point of craziness, is possibly from cuckoo, meaning a bird that goes coo-coo, just that, over and over and over again, coo-coo, coo-coo, which is possibly why cuckoo means crazy. Cootch is a catchy—if in most contexts too familiar—word for what I would have to say is the most extraordinary, if you think about it, part of a woman. Maybe extraordinary is not the word, but you know what I mean. You know what I mean? To babies we say, “Coochy-coo.”

  See ch.

  celebrity

  Originally, in the fourteenth century, a celebrity was something less common: a solemn ceremony or celebration. More recently I saw a TV commercial in which someone unrecognizable popped up to say, “Hello, I’m Fitness Celebrity …” and her name. Can you truly call yourself a celebrity if you have to introduce yourself as one?

  ch

  You can’t tell me there is nothing inherently catchy in the tch or hard-ch sound of English, especially American English, as in catchy. Or clutch, or cinch, or notch, or niche, or chink, or …

  Dontcha just know it? You betcha. Gotcha. Natch. Cha-cha, choo-choo, chowchow, got a hunch, comin atcha, ka-ching, chill, thanks much, chop-chop, chinchin, cheers, ciao, cheerio, check, watch yerself, oo-chi-wa-wa, charmed, buenas noches, right back atchu.

  “The Man Right Chea.” “I Wanna Get Wit Chu.” “Rock Witchu.” Da Brat and Tyrese favoring us with “What ’Chu Like.”

  Scratch, itch, chafe, coochy-coo, hoochie-coochie, nautch dancer, crotch, hunch, punch.

  Pitch. Chuck. John Clare, in the mid-nineteenth century, referred to throwing a ball back and forth as “chuck ball and catch it.”

  Chuckle. Chatter. Chugalug. Hooch. Crunch. Munch. Lunch. Choppers. Chomp. Champ. Chew. Manolha Dargis in The New York Times, on Jack Black’s accent in Nacho Libre: “You hear the quotation marks in the delivery and the thought that goes into every phrasing. That gives the lines chew.”

  Chicken. Cheese. Charley. Macho. Honcho. Mensch. Butch. Britches. Bitch.

  Tchotchke.

  Chockablock. Chocolate chip. Woodchuck chuck. Chain chain chain …

  English has two affricates, j and ch. (See adulation.) An affricate, according to AHD, is “a complex speech sound consisting of a stop consonant followed by a fricative.” A fricative (also AHD) is “a consonant … produced by the the forcing of breath through a constricted passage.” From the Latin “to rub against.” The sound of ch is that of j without vocal-cord vibration.

  People—even those who see no charm in driving a car in such a way as to “scratch off”—like to say ch. It’s a catch. It sets up a release.

  Ahhh-choo.

  See sneeze.

  chimera

  When my daughter, Ennis, was a moppet, we had a talk about what words not to use in the hearing of her grandparents. She assured me that, for example, “I never say fart to anybody until I’ve heard them say it first.” I hope I followed that policy for most of my life with the word chimera, because I knew it meant a wild fantasy, but I pronounced it, in my head, shimer -ra, because I associated it with shimmer, as in a mirage. Then I heard somebody pronounce it correctly, kie-mir-a. I hastened to the dictionaries, which trace it back to a mythical Greek monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Or, sometimes, a lion’s body and head with a second head, that of a goat. A wildly improbable combination of things, then. The rabbitfish, which has rabbitlike teeth, is of the family Chimaeridae.

  Chinese sense of time

  A man I met said he’d been involved in negotiating a big-money agreement with a Chinese company. The Chinese balked at the term “in perpetuity.” What would they agree to instead? “Fifty thousand years.”

  Chinese, would-be purification of

  According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, when the Red Guards were intent upon forcibly regrooving all of Chinese culture along Maoist lines, they tried to eradicate English-tainted foodstuff terms by instructing the state-operated provision store in Shanghai to start referring to cocoa (ke ke) as hong se fen (red-colored powder); coffee beans (ka fei dou) as huang la fen (yellow bitter powder); chocolate bars (chia ke li) as hsiang tsao kuan (fragrant grass—or vanilla—bar); and beer (bi jiu) as mi mai chi jiu (rice and wheat gaseous wine). These changes failed to catch on.

  clever

  Middle English was cliver, nimble handed, from clivers, meaning, as OED puts it, “claws, talons, clutches,” connecting with “the use of the hands, a notion which [redundancy alert] still remains in the general sense of adroit, dexterous, having ‘the brain in the hand.’” Chambers tentatively relates to Old English clifian, meaning cleave, as in adhere. Not the other cleave, as in split. The two cleaves find a certain extra-etymological, and extra-grammatical, unity in the hymnal lyric, “Rock of Ages [or, as Kris Kristofferson sang it, “Rita Coolidge”] , cleft for me.”

  clown

  Want to hear a sad clown story? No, of course you don’t, but this one relates to the war on terror. In 2006, after a slow day of painting faces and twisting balloons for tips in a Manhattan park, a Russian immigrant named Alexander Alhovsky, forty, stopped at Starbucks for a coffee. When he left, his battery-powered balloon pump was still on the counter.

  Police were called. They x-rayed the pump and determined it was not a bomb, but they could not eliminate the possibility that Alhovsky was a terrorist leaving a fake bomb as a test. Surveillance was set up.

  When Alhovsky returned, by his account, police officers knocked him off his bike, kicked him in the kidneys, stepped on his face, held a gun to his head, and dragged him so that his pants and underwear came to his knees in front of neighborhood children.

  Alhovsky sued, claiming post-traumatic stress disorder. He wore his clown outfit to court, but the judge made him change. One of the arresting officers was quoted by the New York Post as saying the pump looked like a bomb to him, adding that the clown “kept saying, ‘I’m just a clown!’ That didn’t mean anything to me.”

  The jury ruled that the police did not use excessive force.

  A term for “morbid fear of clowns” often advanced earnestly on the Web is coulrophobia. Neither OED nor WIII recognizes it, and Etymonline.com says it “looks suspiciously like the sort of thing idle pseudo-intellectuals invent on the Internet and which every smarty-pants takes up thereafter; perhaps it is a mangling of Modern Gk. klooun ‘clown.’”

  On YouTube you can find an affecting clip of a woman being treated for her terror of clowns. Elsewhere online you can buy, in several different designs, T-shirts saying CAN’T SLEEP, CLOWNS WILL EAT ME, which is the name of an Alice Cooper song inspired by a line spoken by Bart on The Simpsons—Homer had built him a bed that looked like an evil clown.

  Here and there online you can find several terms for “fear of police.” The dumbest is policophobia. The most psychiatric sounding is astynomiaphobia , from the Greek for police. The catchiest is popophobia. The cleverest is “common sense.” Of these terms OED acknowledges only the last, which it defines as “the plain wisdom which is everyone’s inheritance,” or, more affirmatively, “general sagacity.”

  consonant

  A poem by my friend Jon Swan:

  THE CREATION OF WORDS

  Hay in the loft. Barn doors

  Open wide as the vowels of Iowa

  through which swallows slip,

  in and out, whispering consonants.

  coot

  There’s something down-home engaging about the sound of this word, isn’t there? Rhymes with Scoot (“Scoot over there, Sugar, and make room for me”), shoot (as in “Aw, shoot”), root, boot, poot, toot, and hoot.

  According to Bill Cotterell of the Tallahassee Democrat, the colorful former Alabama governor Big Jim (or Kissin’ Jim) Folsom in his postgubernatorial years “enjoyed being an old coot, I think. He used to call the UPI bureau in Birmingham three or four times a week when I worked there in 1969, to tell us what he thought about George Wallace. Usually after the cocktail hour, I suspect. He was only 60 at
the time but I thought he was much older because when I’d say, ‘How are you, governor?’ he would invariably reply, ‘Well, the business takes care of itself, I got most of my vision in my good eye and the wife’s not pregnant, so I guess ah’m doin OK.’”

  OED defines the noun coot as a bird or a simpleton. But in the United States a coot is a male senior citizen (perhaps owing to the phrase “bald as a coot,” the bird’s white forehead giving it a baldish appearance). Generally he is an eccentric, entertaining old guy who enjoys messing with people, whether or not they enjoy it all that much.

  The OED does not consider the noun’s possible relation to the obsolete verb coot, which means, as the OED puts it forthrightly, “Of tortoises: To copulate.” (“The Tortoises … coot for fourteen daies together,” 1667.)

  OED does recognize cooter, “a popular name in the Southern United States of two tortoises.” A good deal more than two, I would say, if they coot that much. What other animal can claim to derive its name from its stamina in the hay?

  And yet the phrase cooter along or cooter around is defined in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English as “To idle, loaf, go around aimlessly.” If you cooted two weeks straight, you’d rest up too.

  AHD defines cooter as “an edible freshwater turtle.” If animals could look themselves up! How would you like the second word in your definition to be edible?

  cotton

  We get this word from Old French coton, from Arabic (al) qutn. (Europe first had cotton fabrics from Arab merchants, around A. D. 800.) Spanish renders al qutn as algodón. German goes its own way, with Baumwolle (tree wool), which reflects the widespread early European belief articulated in 1350 by the unreliable travel writer known as John Mandeville: that in India there grew “a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed.”

  Mandeville also reported seeing, in lands that he perhaps imagined, “white hens without feathers, but they have white wool on them,” and cursed folk with no heads (eyes on their shoulders), and “in another isle be folk of foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip,” and “in another isle be folk that have great ears and long, that hang down to their knees.”

  The scientific name for the cotton plant, generically, is Gossypium, from something Pliny called it for some reason. He used the phrase “gossippii bombyx,” which would be fun to translate literally as “silk of gossip,” butgossip derives from Anglo-Saxon originally meaning “godparent,” later “close friend”—a person with whom one is likely to exchange loose talk. These days, however, the Internet suits rumormongering better. If your godparent is drooling and going heee … heee … heee, it may affect your desire to chew the fat. On the Web, some of the people you are sharing with may have just washed their hands from dismembering their godparents, but you needn’t be aware of that.

  Now let us consider coton in Louisiana French. According to Amanda LaFleur in Tonnerre mes chiens! A Glossary of Louisiana French Figures of Speech, this is an unflattering description of two people who are always together: comme cul et coton de maïs, whose “literal translation” would be “like ass and corncob.” But not so literal at that. In the French of France, coton is still cotton, and corncob is épi de maïs. More precisely, épi means ear (of corn or other grain). The relation to épine, thorn or prickle, may be less relevant than the equation with cob as employed in Louisiana outhouses back before toilet paper became a staple would suggest. Still, within the jocular expression LaFleur cites, another one must be nestled: corncob as corn cotton (poor man’s Cottonelle, country two-ply).

  The verb cotton means “to be drawn to, to get along with,” as in “Somehow, although my father was a butthead and my husband is a dweeb, I just don’t cotton to Hannity or Colmes.” According to Etymonline.com, this usage is “perhaps from Welsh cytuno ‘consent, agree.’ But perhaps also a metaphor from cloth finishing.” I would have thought it was a straightforward reference to how cotton fibers cling to each other and to other fuzzy surfaces.

  Sonicky note: cotton to (like lean-to) stresses the firm tongue-to-palate connection of n-t (for the opposite effect, compare slough off); cling to holds that connection slightly apart, ng, before snapping it together, t. The oo sound of the o in to allows us to move on.

  See buckra.

  cough

  The gh here is Old English’s attempt to capture the Proto-Germanic kh, which was like the ch in Scottish loch or German ach. Good cough sound. But there was something catchy about the tikky cough of the old comic-strip character Major Hoople: kaf, kaf, or sometimes hak kaff. The major was a hot-air-spewing stuffed shirt with a huge bulbous nose who wore a ratty-looking fez, smoked stinky cigars, and also emitted noises like HRUMPH, EGAD, DRAT, AWPF, HMP, PSHAW, and, when insulted, SPUTT-TT.

  The surely too polite Latin word for a cough was tussis. Hence Robitussin.

  See hiccup.

  crawfish, crayfish

  What is the difference?

  OED says crawfish is “now used chiefly in U.S.”

  AHD says “chiefly Southern and Midland U.S.”

  OAD muddles the issue by defining crawfish as “a freshwater crayfish” or “another term for spiny lobster” and crayfish (or freshwater crayfish) as “a nocturnal freshwater crustacean that resembles a small lobster and inhabits streams and rivers.”

  I believe some people do refer to small lobsters, such as the French call langouste, or spiny lobsters, such as people around Panacea, Florida, call bulldozers, as crawfish/crayfish, but that’s just crazy.

  We are talking about mudbugs, crawdads. They look like wee lobsters, three or four or five inches long, and if you wade close to them in the daytime (at night they sleep), they will nip slightly.

  Crayfish and crawfish both go way back to fifteenth-century Anglo-French enunciatory variations that emerged from the Old French form crevice, accent on the second syllable. Crevice, morphing into crevise and other variations, probably derived from Old High German krebiz, meaning “edible crustacean” and coming from the PIE root gerbh-, to scratch, from which we also get crab, carve, crawl, scrawl, glamour, grammar, graffito, diagram , epigram, and paragraph.

  Neither crawfish nor crayfish is a fish, duh. The fish element crept in from people’s pronunciations of -vice or -vise.

  Okay. The difference. I have never heard anybody who enjoyed crawfish thoroughly, to the point of sucking the juice out of their heads, pronounce it crayfish. However, I had to admit that you can get even more intimate with a crayfish, in a sense, after I read in The New York Review of Books a review by Sue Halpern of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel: “It is the pursuit of pure science that animates him—hearing for the first time the pop-pop as a neuron fires in the brain of a crayfish …”

  Wow.

  Halpern goes on: “ … finding his ‘voice’ as a scientist, solving the biggest of puzzles with the smallest pieces (cells, molecules, genes).” (See granular.)

  But that pop-pop is what got me. It made me wonder whether I have been callous toward crawfish. When I was a boy in middle Georgia, we would get a long metal tube from somewhere, whittle a cork so it fit fairly tightly into the tube, stick the point of a dart into the cork, and then we’d have a blowgun to take to the creek and shoot crawfish with. We didn’t eat them, the way I have learned to do from people in the coastal South; we just wanted to shoot them. It never occurred to us that anybody would ever hear one think.

  What, besides the juices of a crawfish boil (salt, lemon, onion, garlic, cayenne pepper, other spices) goes through a crawfish’s head?

  You can find anything on the Web, right? I Googled “crawfish brain.”

  Four different sites offered “wholesale crawfish brain,” “cooked crawfish brain,” “fresh crawfish brain Products,” and “frozen crawfish brain Products.”

  Clicking on e
ach of these produced the same result: a photo of a package of whole crawfish laid in close like sardines, with the headline “Crawfish Brain in Dill,” but then, in smaller type, “crawfish brine in dill.” Available from “Hubei Shenlu Aquatic Product & Foodstuff Co., Ltd.”

  That wasn’t what I was looking for. At mobilebay.com, I found a chatty posting by Thomas Zew that included this:

  One other part of the crawfish you might want to venture is the crawfish brain. It’s located in the deepest part of the head right behind the crawfish’s eyes. The brain is dark seaweed-green in color with a wet sandy texture. Once you isolate the brain from the rest of the cavities, suck the pouch encasing the brain. The taste of the brain can be described as bitter mustard like. It’s a nice contrast of flavor. I use it to clean my palette [sic] of the salt and spices so that I can eat more of these addictive crustaceans.

  That was more to the point, but we still weren’t getting anything from the crawfish’s perspective. So I broke down and Googled “crayfish brain.”

  I can now say I have watched video of a crayfish’s brain being removed surgically, with tiny magnified snippers. The brain wasn’t dark green, but then it hadn’t been boiled in condiments. I surfed on along to Answers.com. An anonymous, teacherish question:

 

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