What's In Bill's Head

Word of the day: billhead, plus a roundup of other -head words

2010-07-13T15:29:01-04:00

Recently Google sent me a few searchers who wanted to know how to “design my own billhead” or were interested in the “design of bill head.” With narcissistic delusions of my own grandeur still lingering in my head from my encounter with the paparazzi, I was flattered that someone should want their very own Bill’s Head (note, however, that Bill’s Head is the product of evolution, not of design).

It turns out, though, that a billhead is something altogether different:

A Bill’s Head

A billhead

The billhead is the predecessor to the more familiar letterhead. It’s simply a sheet of paper with a business name and address (and often a logo of some sort) on the top, and lines where the merchant or tradesman could write in the bill or account information. People collect them now, of course, because people collect everything, in a category called “ephemera.” The American Antiquarian Society has a large collection, but alas does not display many online.

Billhead made me think of hogshead, which is a large cask for containing liquids. Like a buttload, the exact capacity of a hogshead originally varied depending on the type of liquid being held, and on the locale. The quantity did not depend on the size of the local hogs, though: it’s unclear how the head of a hog came to be used this way, but the measurement is not related to the capacity of actual hog heads. The word originated in English and was later adopted in other Germanic languages, becoming “ox-head” in some of them.

The volume of a hogshead was standardized by statute in 1423, but the number still depended on what you were measuring. If you’re measuring wine, for example, it’s 63 gallons, and you need two hogsheads to make a buttload.

From here it did not take long for me to start thinking about defining my very own measure of volume, the “billshead.” To make it easier for future etymologists, I decided that the billshead should have a more straightforward relationship to its namesake than the hogshead does. Ideally it should be the volume of liquid that Bill’s Head could hold if you scooped out everything else that’s in there, but this was going to be infeasibly fatal to measure. So I settled for “the volume of Bill’s Head” (contents intact; i.e., the outer volume), which is much easier to calculate.

This is exactly what I did

To make the calculation I filled a bucket with water, all the way to the brim. I wrote a little note to explain what I was doing (for whoever found my body, in case it all went horribly wrong) and stuck my head in the bucket, completely ignoring the warning sticker on the bucket that tells you not to do this. This all turns out to be a little tricky to do on your own, because it’s hard to tell if you’ve got your head in there far enough to get an accurate measurement of your head, without getting too much of the neck. But I think I came close enough. (For those of you obsessively concerned with methodology and accuracy, I’ll note that I don’t have enough hair to absorb much water, but I did hold my head over the bucket after I pulled it out of the water and tried to return all the water that had accumulated on my head and in my ears and nose. Tip if you’re going to try this at home: use nose plugs.)

Once my head was out of the bucket, I measured how far the water level was now below the rim of the bucket, and from that calculated the volume of water that my head had displaced: 5.498 liters, which we’ll round to a more convenient 5.5 liters.

So: a billshead is now officially defined as 5.5 liters.

That’s 5.5 liters of anything you want, mind you: we won’t be using a different definition for each commodity, as is the case with a hogshead.

I have found it surprisingly difficult to assess the accuracy of my measurement or to find out if my head is a normal size: I have not been able to find any credible reference source (after at least 10 minutes of reviewing Google results) that tells me what average volume of a human head is. The only source I found was at WikiAnswers, where the answerer claims to have measured his own head at 4.9 liters using the same method I used. All other sources are focused more on the volume of the brain, or the weight of the head or brain. Attention scientists: I simply do not understand why this information is not more readily available. Someone should get to work on that.

One thing I did find, somewhat strangely, while searching for “average head size” or something like that, was an article from the “Growing up in the Lord: A Study for Teenage Boys” section of the La Vista Church of Christ’s Web site, entitled “How do you measure your testicles?“

Finished with billhead, hogshead, and billshead, I went looking for other -head words,¹ hoping to find some other units of measure based on heads. I didn’t find any more of those, but I did find a lot more -heads than I expected. There are plenty of the sort that you’d expect, i.e., the head of something, like a railhead or a beachhead. But also a lot of words that aren’t the head of anything. This is because there is (or was, as most of these words are obsolete now) a -head suffix in English that derived from the same root as -hood, and carries the same meaning.

Since I was searching the OED, I turned up all sorts of obsolete Middle English and Scottish² words that end with -head in that sense. Some of them survive today with a -hood suffix instead; in others the -head has been replaced with -ness or another suffix conveying the same sense. For example, beastlihead is now beasthood or beastliness; comelihead is now comeliness. Maidenhead survives as a poetic reference to virginity or to the hymen, while maidenhood has adopted a different meaning, referring to the state of being a maiden or young girl.

The obsolescence of many of these words makes them sound poetic. Some of my favorites, which I shall try to revive, are notefulhead (usefulness), firelihead (ardor or eagerness; firely is a sadly obsolete adjective meaning ardent or furious), and clumsthead (mental or moral stupefaction; from clumse, a verb meaning to stupefy, amaze, or daze).

Some familiar -head words have meanings you’re probably not familiar with. For example, an air-head is now a foolish or frivolous person, but long before that was a passage used to carry air from one part of a mine to another, and more recently an airbase that supports a military operation (like a beachhead, but for planes).

And of course I found some words that sound funnier than they are, which you could profitably put to use in your own daily conversations when you need a novel insult.

Like futtock-head, which in shipbuilding is the name for some specific parts of the ship’s frame (the fifth, seventh, and ninth diagonals, specifically). A futtock is one of the curved timbers that forms the ribs of the ship but has the advantage of sounding naughty since it looks like fuck and buttock. (Butt-head, by the way, has a nautical meaning as well, far older than its use as an insult: “The end of a plank or plate in a vessel’s side which joins or butts on to the end of the next.”)

Or crappit-head, a Scottish delicacy consisting of “the head of a haddock stuffed with the roe, oatmeal, suet, and spices.”

Or jerkin-head, and architectural term for “the end of a roof not hipped down to the level of the opposite adjoining walls, the gable being carried higher than the level of those walls.”

And so concludes today’s roundup of -head words, a veritable billshead of them.

Notes

1. The Internet seems to have known I would write this post: I’ve already had visits from searchers looking for “words that end in head.” [Back to text]

2. I found that if I pronounced a word like childhood to myself in an exaggerated Scottish accent it sounded a lot like childhead, an obsolete variant of the word. [Back to text]

Eke! How is a nickname like a newt?

2010-06-24T07:19:00-04:00

The other day I was on a Web page that accepted comments and I noticed that, in the form where you register to be a commenter, it asked you to select a "nick-name." The hyphenation of back-up was defensible, but nickname is the long-established correct form and there just shouldn't be a hyphen. Unfortunately I lost track of which Web site this was so I can't send you there to see for yourself, or go back myself to see if maybe it was a site run by people who do not speak English natively.

But that encounter with nickname reminded me of this entry I wrote on nickname for the old Word Site back in 1997, explaining where nicknames came from.

A nickname was originally an ekename, from the Old and Middle English eke, meaning "additional." By a process called metanalysis, the n from the an became "misplaced," resulting by the early 15th century in forms such as neke name and nycke name. The modern, single-word form nickname appears for the first time in print in the early 1700s. Metanalysis—common in the development of the English language—also turned an ewte into a newt and, working in the other direction, a nauger into an auger.

Eke, once a venerable and indispensable part of the language, was eventually replaced by words such as additional (which did not appear until the seventeenth century) and also. It survives in expressions such as "eke out a living," where it refers to supplementing or augmenting something or to making something last longer.

Attention: Don't be a clyster-pipe

2010-05-25T09:13:32-04:00

A clyster-pipe in action

When you were a kid, you probably called people "retards" when they did something stupid or awkward or were otherwise in need of being insulted. In my neighborhood (in Phoenix), we called them "gompers" instead. If you're a member of the Texas school board, you may be cheering the fact that we insulted people by branding them as labor organizers, but in fact the only thing we knew about Samuel Gompers was that there was a school for people with developmental disabilities named after him, and if I remember correctly, it was right next to my elementary school. So we were calling people "retards" as well, in our own localized slang.¹ (I don't know if the expression was widely used all over Phoenix, or just common in my neighborhood. I was somehow surprised that the Urban Dictionary has an entry for this usage of the word.)

These days, many of us realize that we shouldn't call people "retards," because this usage is offensive to people who actually are retarded (in the clinical sense of the word) and to those who care about them. Of course, we're not supposed to call retarded people retarded, either, because of the negative connotations the word has taken on through its non-clinical use. Eventually the word will lose its original literal, clinical meaning, and we'll go back to happily using it as an insult, just as we do with "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron," which all were once clinical terms.² In the meantime, though, no one can use "retard" in any context at all (you probably shouldn't even apply fire retardant, to be safe).

This illustrates one of the biggest challenges of life in our present Age of Enlightenment: how do you insult someone without accidentally offending the wrong people?

It's entertaining, perhaps, to watch the characters on "Deadwood" calling each other "cocksucker" left and right, but you can't go around calling men cocksuckers any more, because the only reason that's an insult is that it implies that he is gay and/or somebody's bitch and that there's something wrong with that, and we now know that it is perfectly OK to be gay, or to be somebody's bitch if that's your thing. You have the same problem with, say, "assfucker" or "dicklicker." Even if you are calling a woman a cocksucker or an assfucker it's still offensive because you are implying that there is something wrong with people who enjoy oral or anal sex. (If you weren't implying this, there would be no point to calling someone an assfucker—you might just as well call her a "rainbow," or an "afternoon-napper.") (On the other hand, if you are a member of one of the major theistic cults, you can probably go right ahead and use these terms without fear of accidental insult, because by god you mean to insult and condemn those who practice non-procreative and/or homosexual sex, whom your god hates.)

Similarly, "motherfucker" is only an insult because you are implying that the person you are "motherfucking" is the sort of person who would have sex with his mother, and that there is something wrong with that act. So you will be offending the people who find nothing shameful in that sort of thing. "Sheepfucker" will get the bestialists up in arms. "Fucktard" has a nice ring to it, but is insulting not only to people with mental disabilities, but also to those who have intercourse with them. You're probably safe with "earfucker," since the only people who go for that are real deviants who deserve to be offended, but "earfucker" lacks punch as an insult precisely because we don't have any strong taboos against aural sex (otosexuals?)—probably because it just doesn't come up that often.

So what's an enlightened human to do? How can you offend without being offensive?

There are plenty of mild insults you can safely use. I like "jackass," for example, and sometimes that works just right. "Asshole" is OK, because everyone can admit that the anus is often a dirty place, and even if you like to visit one occasionally, you wouldn't want to be one. But it's so commonly used that it sounds a little mild ("asshat" is gaining ground as a replacement). "Fucker" by itself is no longer much good, because there's nothing wrong with being someone who has sex. Where's the insult in that?

"Douche" and its various forms ("douchey," "douchebag") seem to be very popular lately, but I've never liked these, partly because they seem to me "vulgar" in the wrong sense—rather unrefined, or low-class—the sort of thing a frat-boy or similar tool would say. In fact the earliest citation in the OED of "douchebag" as an insult is "an unattractive co-ed. By extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate," suggesting that in fact it did originate with the frat boys. Also it surprises me that women have embraced the term, given its origins and connotations (Overthinking It has a nice discussion of all this, if you're now dying for more on the subject). But mostly, it's just so overused now that it's time for something fresh.

"Caricature of a Doctor" by Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755)

This brings us (finally!) to one of my long-time favorites: clyster-pipe!

A "clyster" is an enema, and a "clyster-pipe" is the pipe you use to deliver one. During the Renaissance period, "clyster-pipe" was also a derogatory name for a medical practitioner, making reference to the quack "doctors" who thought a good enema could cure any ailment.³ (And, apropos, the same name was sometimes applied to a douching apparatus.)

Clyster-pipe has a lot going for it:

It avoids the problem we started out to solve: it doesn't disparaging anyone's abilities, disabilities, differences, genetics, preferences, or beliefs, so it's safe to use in all scenarios.

Even better, it's an uncommon phrase and most people won't be familiar with it. By using it, you're demonstrating that you're at the cultural fore, not grabbing on to the tail-end of the douche train. It's not on any banned-word lists, so you can use it anywhere you want, without being censored. And of course you can feel smug in your intellectual superiority when you call some douchebag a clyster-pipe to his face and he has no idea what you mean.

But he'll still get your gist since "clyster-pipe" sounds like it should be obscene. Perhaps this is because "clyster" sounds like a combination of "clit" and "blister." Or maybe because it sounds sort of like "cluster-fuck." (In fact, I often think of "clyster-pipe" when I hear "cluster-fuck." That's how this whole post got started: yesterday while I was stuck in a traffic cluster-fuck on the highway some clyster-pipe in a pimped-out Sentra came cruising up the shoulder to get around everyone.)

And if he does know what it means, it's a gross thing to be compared to. Grosser than a douchebag, because the clyster-pipe is used to deliver beer and oatmeal directly into your rectum, while the douche-bag is just used to squirt fresh rosewater into your lady-parts.

So take firm hold of my wordly gift and go forth to insult with abandon!

Notes

1. Our use of "gomper" strikes me as even more offensive than just saying "retard," because with "gomper" we were making explicit the connection to mental retardation, and insulting the mentally handicapped people at the Gompers school at the same time we were insulting our friends. [Back to text]

2. In a previous post I used "cretin" as an insult. I apologize to anyone afflicted by the congenital deformity known as cretinism (or, as the OED puts it, "dwarfed and specially deformed idiots") whom I may have offended. [Back to text]

3. The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (from 1770) has this helpful information about clysters:

Clysters are sometimes used to nourish and support a patient who can swallow little or no aliment, by reason of some impediment in the organs of deglutition. In which case they may be made of broth, milk, ale, and decoctions of barley and oats with wine. The English introduced a new kind of clyster, made of the smoke of tobacco, which has been used by several other nations, and appears to be of considerable efficacy in the iliac passion, in the hernia incarcerata, and for the recover of drowned persons.

So the next time you need to revive a drowned person, skip the CPR and just squirt some liquid smoke up her ass.

[Back to text]

I love the smell of organic compounds in the morning

2010-05-23T12:40:25-04:00

It's a rainy day here at Bill's Head World Headquarters, where I've been working this morning on re-posting some old material. (If you're reading this by RSS, you might want to peruse the Language and Word of the Day categories for these golden oldies, since they're back-dated and therefore won't appear in your feed.)

I posted the gruft entry, and the continuing rain theme made me think of "petrichor", defined by the OED as "a pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions." It's also the word for the mixture of organic compounds that collects on the ground and is believed to produce the smell.

I think I remember reading a really nice article about petrichor long ago, but I can't find it now. The Word Detective has a brief discussion of petrichor here. Have I mentioned recently that you should be reading The Word Detective?

Want to know more about the sciency details? You might care to read this "Genesis of petrichor" paper by I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas:

Several possible mechanisms have been considered in connection with the origin of this odour. These include the synthesis of odorous compounds on the clay or rock surface by spontaneous catalysis of atmospheric gases, the sorption of organic compounds from the atmosphere, catalytic transformation of sorbed compounds and microbial activity. Evidence is presented which suggests the atmosphere contains, as general contaminants, lipids, terpenes, carotenoids and other volatile decomposition products from animal and vegetable matter. The sorption of these compounds, or their oxygenated derivatives, by rocks and clays is controlled by the properties of the sorbent and the partial water vapour pressure of the atmosphere, low relative humidities favouring maximum uptake. Oxidation and transformation of sorbates take place on the rock surface and are accelerated by warm to hot climatic conditions. The odorous and volatile products of these processes are subsequently displaced from the pores of the rock by moisture when the relative humidity of the atmosphere approaches saturation.

The possibility of a relationship between petrichor and petroleum formation is discussed.

Or you could search around to find more information for free.

Searching for scody

2006-08-27T11:37:00-04:00

Last time I had dinner with my parents my mother was talking about the “scody” houses we stayed in during some of our family beach trips when I was young. The next day I was telling a friend that I knew, as soon as the conversation turned to the beach houses, that they would be described as “scody,” because that’s the word Mom uses for grubby, grimy things. The friend had never heard the word before, and I realized I had never heard it used outside my family.

A check of the major dictionaries turned up absolutely nothing, but Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary (to which anyone can submit entries) had this entry:

Disgusting, filthy, squalid, dilapidated or (of people) sleazy. Generally, extremely unappealing.
My friend lives in a really scody old house.

So Mom isn’t quite the only one using the word (despite the coincidence of the house example, I can assure you that my mother is not submitting words to the Open Dictionary).

When I started searching Google for other people using the word, I was surprised to find that most of the examples I came upon were from people in New Zealand, most of whom are also far younger than my mother.

From a discussion on socks to wear when raving, at an urban culture site in New Zealand:

woah ok. lets all rip into me for liking socks. and actually i do wear good shoes, ive tried my etnies and they were ok but i tend to go for my low cut chuks. i have also tried plasters on the “prone area” and every time i do that the “prone area” becomes somewhere new, i figure tho soon my feet will be so scody and calloused that theyll b unblistereable....oh the joys of feet. and i dont think thick socks woukld make u more prone to toe jams, athletes foot or any other fungal/bacterial infection as just socks would b more breathable than shoes and socks.

From a site cluing parents in on their kids’ lingo:

me and my homies(aka mates) like to use the word snazzy witch means cool.we also like to use the word scody witch means ehhhhhhhhh or gross .Unco means not cool.HIHO is a mix between hi and hello.when we talk about cute boys we call them hunks, tuds, muffins, babes.when we have a crush we call them our lover lover boys.—Sarah—Age: 11—From NEW ZEALAND

From a discussion at a New Zealand gaming site discussing whether it’s true that eight in 10 teenagers are bisexual:

a greater proportion of girls are clean and non-scody than guys, as this is the norm for our society. Makes it easier for girls to be attracted to girls, and guys not to guys

Now, my mother did live in several countries when she was young (England, Denmark, Panama) but never even visited New Zealand until a year ago, decades after she had added scody to her vocabulary. When I related all of this to her, she was as surprised as I to learn how uncommon the word is, and speculated that she and her siblings may have picked it up while they were living in England as children.

Other spellings also appeared in a few places: skody, scodie.

The word is reminiscent of grody, which appeared in the 1960s but is most strongly associated with the 1980s Valley Girl phrase “Grody to the max.” Grody was originally grotty, appearing in British slang as a shortened form of grotesque. From a discussion at the Scarleteen site (use the Google cache version if the original link doesn’t work):

what makes him “scody” anyway? what’s “scody”? i am too old to know what such things mean. it is like “grody”? that’s a word we used when i was in junior high.

Scrody also turns up, defined at the Urban Dictionary as “like grody, but sounds better.” Based on my unscientific sampling of Google results, scrody appears to be more common in the U.S. than scody is. Presumably scrody and scody are related, but I haven’t found any evidence for a link, or for the origins of scrody.

But none of this brings me much closer to explaining where scody came from, or why my mother is one of the few Americans who uses the word. So, readers (especially adults outside of New Zealand), help me out here: have you run into the word before? Has anyone seen an explanation of its origin?

Flustrated no more

2006-08-26T16:54:00-04:00

A friend of mine was recently venting some workplace frustration to a coworker, who advised her not to get “flustrated.” When she told me this story, we both assumed, since the coworker in question had a history of mispronunciations and malapropisms, that she was simply inadvertently conflating “flustered” and “flustrated.” As I thought more about it, though, I was struck by the fact that flustrated perfectly captured the situation—my friend was getting flustered as a result of her frustration. If flustrated wasn’t a real word it needed to be.

I turned first to the OED and found that flustrate (”vulgar or jocular” in usage) is quite old, with flustrated appearing in print in 1712. The OED lists the derivation as FLUSTER + ATE and lists the alternate spelling flusterate. Merriam-Webster game the same etymology, while Random House Webster’s suggested a combination of fluster and frustrate. The Random House Mavens contend that the word is just an elaborate form of fluster but admit that some recent examples do suggest a blend or a confusion with frustrate.

A Google search turns up over 12,000 hits, most from people complaining about other people using the word, and/or opining (incorrectly) that it is a “made up” word. One newspaper article in particular caught my eye. Writing in The Morning Sun, Sue Metzger says that

Sometimes two similar words are mistakenly combined into a single word that exceeds the boundaries of meaning. “Flustrated” is a non-word created from “flustered” and “frustrated.” Flustered means “confused, nervous, excited”; frustrated means “disappointed, defeated, obstructed.”

It may be possible to entertain all those feelings simultaneously, but creating a technically correct adverb/verb—“frustratingly flustered”—is as awkward as “flustrated” is wrong. Maybe we should just say “confused and disappointed.”

Metzger’s logic escapes me here: if it’s possible to “entertain all those feelings simultaneously,” then flustrated doesn’t exceed the boundaries of meaning, and if the word captures the feeling, how is it “wrong”? “Confused and disappointed” isn’t the state we’re going for here—to be flustrated is to be “agitated by disappointment or dissatisfaction.”

I stand by my original impression: as an elaboration of flustered, flustrated is silly and dull. But as a combination of flustered and frustrated, it’s superb. So be careful to use it only in just the right situation.

Digressions

While researching this entry I came upon Spamradio, which manages to make something poetic out of that flustrating spam that fills your inbox.

It took me a fair amount of looking to figure out what community The Morning Sun serves. I finally found it, though, in small print on the main page: “Covering Mount Pleasant and Alma County’s, Michigan.” Oh, the irony.

D'oh! Behind already

2006-08-22T20:40:00-04:00

One or two of you have commented that the “word of the day” missed a few days. Please note that it’s “word of the day,” not “new word every day.”

Now, onward:

The interjection doh! (often spelt d’oh) will perhaps forever be associated with cartoon character Homer Simpson, who made it a part of American culture. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, explained the origin of the word in a 1998 interview in Daily Variety:

The D’oh came from character actor James Finlayson’s “Do-o-o-o” in Laurel & Hardy pictures. You can tell it was intended as a euphemism for “Damn.” I just speeded it up.

Dan Castellaneta may have invented the word independently, but in fact it had been around—and used the same way—for at least 40 years, appearing in print as early as 1945. The OED's definition is amusing:

Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also (usu. mildly derogatory): implying that another person has said or done something foolish.

The similar duh dates from around the same time: a 1943 Merrie Melodies cartoon has the line

Duh... Well, he can’t outsmart me, 'cause I’m a moron.

Buttloads of fun

2006-08-16T00:35:00-04:00

Buttload is used to express a vague but large quantity; it is often assumed to be a meaningless word (stemming from butt in the sense of buttocks) of the sort we’re so fond of coining based on vulgar words (cf. shitload, or the myriad words and phrases based on fuck). A buttload is, as it turns out, a more or less quantifiable measure, in no way related to the buttocks or their capacity.

The butt referred to here is a heavy, two-wheeled cart, drawn by oxen or horses (for example, a dung-butt is a cart used to haul manure). A butt-load is the quantity that your average butt can hold. In the earliest written description of a butt-load (1796), this is said to be “about six seams.” A seam is “a pack-horse load,” the exact quantity originally depending on both the locale and the item being measured. A seam of glass, for example, was 120 pounds; a seam of apples was 9 pecks. Later, a seam was more or less standardized at 3 hundredweight of hay or manure, or 2 hundredweight of straw. So a buttload of manure would be roughly 2,016 pounds (a hundredweight is about 112 pounds; 3 hundredweight makes a seam; 6 seams is a buttload).

Butt, by the way, is not a shortened form of buttock. Rather, as near as anyone can tell, buttock is formed from butt by addition of the suffix -ock, which is used to form diminutives. This is the same -ock found in words such as hillock (a small hill), tussock (originally a tuft of hair), haddock, and bullock (originally a young bull, later a castrated bull; bullock comes from the Old English bulluc—the -uc suffix is a variant form of -ock).

Hey, man, cuck you and your socks

2006-08-15T11:37:00-04:00

During a recent instant messaging conversation, a friend made a comment that required a reply along the lines of “that’s too bad.” “That’s too bad” not being quite my style (or perhaps not quite strong enough for the occasion), I replied, “that’s a real fucker.” Or rather, I meant to reply, “that’s a real fucker,” but I missed the f and instead typed “that’s a real cucker.” I corrected myself but then thought, “perhaps it could be a real cucker.

A quick trip to the OED told me that cuck is an obsolete intransitive verb meaning “to void excrement,” so a cucker is a shitter, and “that’s a real shitter” would have been a perfectly suitable expression of my opinion in this case.

The beauty of cucker is that it sounds obscene (because it sounds a lot like fucker) and is, I suppose, obscene, due to the idea it expresses, but you can use it without anyone knowing you’re being obscene. In addition to using it as a substitute for shit and shitter, I suggest you try using cuck and cucker as general-purpose expletives along the lines of fuck and fucker.

Amusingly, the online Urban Dictionary lists “sock cucker” as a spoonerism for “cock sucker,” indicating that it “is often used to veil the insult and make it appear less offensive or even to make it go undetected.” In fact the phrase inadvertently creates a novel (and much funnier) insult.

Digression

The Urban Dictionary describes itself as “a slang dictionary with your definitions.” Contributor Salt Licky clearly doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of “slang,” as he (I think we can safely assume he is a he, based on his other contributions) has contributed the phrase “sock drawer,” meaning “the drawer that holds your socks.”

It's automagic!

2006-08-14T00:45:00-04:00

Those of you who work in the computer world are probably familiar with automagic, which is often used to explain how things work when we really don’t know how they work, or don’t want to explain them to non-techies: “just click the RSS button up there and new columns will arrive in your inbox each day automagically.”

Think it’s a recent word, made up late one night by a computer geek? Nope: automagic appeared in 1945, as the model name of a combination clothes/dish washer:

The Thor Automagic Washer is a streamlined cabinet with two separate tubs... Each tub is complete in itself—compact, sanitary, operated automagically.

See more ads for the Thor Automagic Washer here.