the Word for Thursday

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.

the Word for Wednesday

TWITTERPATED


Besotted


This lovely term appeared, slightly differently, in the article Sex in Space in Wired magazine on 18 May 2007: “How do you handle love, sex, romance, heart-break, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you’re 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you’ll make it back?”


It refers to the feelings you get when you think about your current object of desire. A contributor to the Urban Dictionary defined it as “An enjoyable disorder characterized by feelings of excitement, anticipation, high hopes, recent memories of interludes, giddiness, and physical overstimulation which occur simultaneously when experiencing a new love.”


One stimulus for its current popularity is that it appears in the film Bambi II, following on its invention in the original Bambi of 1942, in which Friend Owl says, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime.” When the film first came out, the Oakland Tribune remarked that “‘Twitterpated’ is perhaps the best adjective coined by Hollywood since the pixilated sisters were invented for ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.’”


It also shows signs of becoming accepted, at least in the short term, as a mildly derogatory term for those obsessive communicators who use the online medium Twitter to tell their friends every small thing they’re doing with their day.

WTF?!! I CAN'T GET INTO MY YOUTUBE NOW!! GEEZ

I CREATED A NEW ID AND HAVE BEEN DIGGING THRU ALL VIDEOS FROM MY ACCOUNT..GOTTA SHARE A FEW GOOD ONES WITH YOU
this dog is whacked!!

WOW..HAVE I GOT A GUY FOR YOU!!!!

the Joke for Wednesday

An old man and his son had a one-horse farm where they barely made a living. Then, one day, the son hit the lottery and won $50,000. 

The young man rushed into town, collected his money, then hurried back home. He ran across the field, told his father the news, and handed the older man a $50 bill. 

The father looked at the money for a moment and then said, "Son, you know I've always been careful with what little money we had. I didn't spend it on whiskey or women. In fact, I couldn't even afford the license to legally marry your Ma." 

"Pa!" the young man stammered, "do you know what that makes me?" 

"Yep," said the old man fingering the $50, "... and a cheap one, too.