The NEVERENDING word(s) of the day thread

Lots of things here I didn't know. (And I bet you didn't either.) For one thing, I always thought this word was of Yiddish derivation.

Cockamamie

Something ridiculous, incredible or implausible.

"Cockamamie" is intrinsically funny, but it's truly incredible that
word historians believe it's a close relative of "decal", a design
prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is
instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be
the case.)

The original of both "cockamamie" and "decal" is the French
"décalcomanie", which was created in the early 1860s to refer to
the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines
"décalquer", to transport a tracing, with "manie", a mania or
craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain - it's
recorded in the magazine The Queen on 27 February 1864: "There are
few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen
months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as
decalcomanie". It reached the United States around 1869 and - to
judge from the number of newspaper references in that year - became
as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word
was quickly Anglicised as "decalcomania" and in the 1950s it became
abbreviated to "decal".

The link between "decalcomania" and "cockamamie" isn't proved, but
the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in
the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the
other. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period,
using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum.
Shelly Winters wrote of "cockamamie" in The New York Times in 1956
that "This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized
pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie
a decalcomania is stared at."

Quite how the word changed sense to mean something incredible is
least clear of all. An early sense was of something inferior or
second-rate, which presumably referred to the poor quality of the
cheap transfers. It might have been influenced by words such as
"cock-and-bull" or "poppycock". Anyone who adopted the craze for
sticking transfers on oneself may have been regarded by adults or
more serious-minded youngsters as silly - certainly the first sense
was of a person who was ridiculous or crazy; the current sense came
along a few years later.

World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2004. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.

Andy boobie, I was born well after the thirties. Yet, when my friends and I got those wet-em and stick-em on tattoos, we called them cockamamies. Never even heard of a decal until I was older and more worldly.

That must be Newyorkese, 'Boita. I had never heard cockamamie used in any other sense than that of nutty, crazy, weird, screwed-up. Now what did we call those thingies in Boston? I don't think we said 'decals' either. I think -- but I only think -- that we called them transfers.

Love cockamamie!

Here is a recipe for TREACLE-WATER for those winter coughs:
green walnuts, Venice-treacle, brandy and vinegar
Did you know that on this day in 1919 a 50-ft tall treacle/molasses tank exploded in Boston, killing 21?

I knew the story, Clary, but didn't realize that it was on this date. People in that neighborhood (the North End) swear that on a sweltering day in the Summer you can still get a faint whiff of molasses wafting up from the hot pavement. There was a rolling avalanche of molasses flowing down Hanover Street on this date in 1919.

And you wonder why we Bostonians are weird?

I always thought you were a load of nobs...
Today I have the word MOOLS which is a singular noun meaning ...the earth of the grave... damn, I should have used it for Balderdash!

Wow, I am truly in awe......neat...I like it.
But I (from the 'woods') allways called it Bolderdash.
Now please take into account where ..I be from. haha
This is my first time at this particular 'spot'. I think I like it, I like it.

oh please don't let ME be the one to put a screaching halt to this one.....


Hows abouts

GRAND CANYON!

Weird Words: Pinchbeck

Cheap or tawdry.

That is perhaps the more common meaning of the word today, on the
rare occasions on which it turns up in print at all, though those
versed in the fields of jewellery, clocks and other objets d'art
will know that strictly it refers to an alloy of zinc and copper -
so a type of brass - that looks remarkably like gold.

Outside these specialist areas, the word's most common appearance
is as a family name, which is only fit and proper, since we are in
the area of eponyms here - things named after people. The man who
invented the alloy was one Christopher Pinchbeck, a clockmaker born
in Clerkenwell in London, though his shop was at the "sign of the
Astronomico-Musical Clock" in Fleet Street. He was also a well-
known maker of musical automata such as singing birds. His name
probably came from the place called Pinchbeck near Spalding in
Lincolnshire; that name is from Old English words meaning either
"minnow stream" or "finch ridge" (from which we may deduce the
uncertain state of the study of English placenames).

He seems to have invented his eponymous metal sometime in the early
1700s, though there's no contemporary reference and we have to rely
on statements by his sons. He created it as a way to make ornaments
that looked like gold but were less expensive. There was no attempt
at deception here - he clearly labelled the metal for what it was.
To start with, it was a respected alternative to gold: jewellers in
the eighteenth century used it legitimately to make nice-looking
jewellery that could be worn in places in which theft was frequent,
such as on stagecoach journeys, without fear of losing valuables.

However, so many jewellers used it for inferior goods, passing off
pinchbeck as gold, that the word took on the sense of something
that was of poor quality or a cheap imitation. Nineteenth century
authors found in the word a neat metaphor for all that is spurious
or counterfeit, as Anthony Trollope did in Framley Parsonage:
"Where, in these pinchbeck days, can we hope to find the old
agricultural virtue in all its purity?"

World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2004. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.

Pinchbeck?! Andy, where do you encounter such words?

Adele, No one can end this thread. It just stops and then starts again and stops and starts, etc.

'Boita -- see the copyright notice at the bottom of post? Michael Quinion comes up with this stuff weekly. I subscribe to his newsletter.

I ran across this on another site and thought I'd share. What do you philologists think?

FINAL AUTHORITY YOUR AUNT TILLY'S PRUNE PAN DOWDY. Webster's New World
College Dictionary, the final authority in many newsrooms, missed
ranking as worst in the language by only one position. The worst is
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, another popular one in
newsrooms.
So says Robert Hartwell Fiske in Vocabula Review
http://www.vocabula.com/2004/VRJAN04FiskeFree.asp
wherein he examined six college dictionaries' treatments of 25 words
that are commonly misused. For example, all six dictionaries allowed
"alright" in their pages, when Sister Mary Angelica taught us all that
"all right" is the (wham) only (wham) all (wham) right (wham) one.
Or do you say "disconnect" when you mean "miscommunication?" Only the
Oxford American College Dictionary didn't fall for that.
And how about "anyways" when you mean "anyway?" Nobody got that one
correctly.
Or what of fatal for fateful, fearful for fearsome, infer for imply,
reticent for reluctant, or where when what you really wanted was that?
The dictionaries that Fiske examined were: The American Heritage
College Dictionary, 4th Edition; Webster's New World College Dictionary,
4th Edition; the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary 1st Edition;
Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 2nd Edition; the Oxford
American College Dictionary, 1st Edition; and Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.
The mere recognition by a dictionary of an erroneous usage is enough
to irk Fiske. He counts himself among language conservatives, or
prescriptivists, as against the liberals or descriptivists.
"Irresponsible writers and boneless lexicographers" pollute the language
with trendy remakes, to the delight of descriptivists but the dismay of
Fiske.

Mooches grassy ass, Andy. I enjoyed reading that. I am often appalled at nonwords being acknowledged in dictionaries. "Alright." I don't care who says what. There ain't no such thing. I guess I'm a prescriptivist. And I always thought a prescriptivist was a doctor. Who knew?

Thanks Roberta! I'ma feelin' cozy now

Anyone ever hear of the term,
'pert 'ni but not plum..

Means ..'almost, but not quite.'

Very interesting Merry. I skim through though.
But still get the 'drift'.

Adele, that's just a dialect way of saying, "Pretty near but not plumb." Sounds like an old carpenters' and construction workers' argot expression. To be in plumb means to be perfectly level and at precisely joined right angles. The corners of a house have to be 'in plumb' to assure that the structure won't lean sideways.

oh Merry Andrew, I would like to thank you for such a precise meaning of that particular quote.
Hmmmm.......ya got me hahhahahaha

Is it too late to submit "LAVENDYRE?

Iblis, Welcome to a2k. It's never too late. Care to expand on LAVENDYRE?

callipygian : having shapely buttocks.

I feel it's an important word that everyone should have in their vocabulary.

Be good.

Folderol

Trivia or nonsense; a showy but useless item.

From before Shakespeare's "There was a lover and his lass, / With a
hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no" down to and beyond Pogo's "Deck
the halls with Boston Charlie, / Walla Walla Wash, and Kalamazoo",
nonsense words have a regular feature of song lyrics. You might
think that it's a stretch to suggest another meaningless la-la
lyric filler is the origin of this usefully dismissive word.
However, that indeed seems to be its origin, although the usual
form until relatively recently was "falderal" rather than
"folderol".

There are many traditional rhymes and songs with variants of "fal-
de-ral" in them somewhere. For example, Robert Bell noted these
words of an old Yorkshire mummer's play in his Ancient Poems,
Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry Of England of 1857: "I hope
you'll prove kind with your money and beer, / We shall come no more
near you until the next year. /Fal de ral, lal de lal, etc." And
Sir Walter Scott included a few lines of an old Scottish ballad in
The Bride of Lammermoor (1819): "There was a haggis in Dunbar, /
Fal de ral, etc. / Mony better and few waur, / Fal de ral, etc."
Charles Dickens had gentle fun with this habit in his Sketches By
Boz of 1836-7: "Smuggins, after a considerable quantity of coughing
by way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which afford
general delight, sings a comic song, with a fal-de-ral - tol-de-ral
chorus at the end of every verse, much longer than the verse
itself."

It was around 1820 that this traditional chorus is first recorded
as a term for a gewgaw or flimsy thing that was showy but of no
value, though it had to wait until the 1870s before it started to
be widely used.

World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2004. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.