Wordcatcher (29 page)

A roadhouse; music box; to,fake in basketball. Street
slang
for sex, dancing, music, great basketball moves, funky roadside shack for food, music, and sometimes, good lovin’. Evidently,
juke
derives from
juke joint
, a kind of off-road brothel. Sociologists would describe a
juke
as a transgressive or liminal space. Etymologists trace the word to two languages in West Africa: the Gullah word
juk
, infamous, wicked, and the Wolof
jug
, disorderly, and
zug
, to live wickedly. Closely related is the Bambara
jugu
, a naughty person. Of course, other theories flail about, like those roadhouse dancers, tracing the word back to the French
jouer
, play, and Scottish
jouk
, hide, evade, dodge, and
jookerie
, a secret place where “marks” are swindled. So, like a good gumbo, the word was seasoned by many influences from the sensual subculture of New Orleans, which thrived in the
juke joints
, where “barrelhouse music” was played and “barrelhouse liquor” was served by the cup on a make-shift
bar with a plank set across two barrels. Eventually,
juke
became shorthand for the music machines. Essayist Michael Ventura suggests that
juke
came from Storyville, in New Orleans. Originally, he writes, it meant “to fuck,” while
jelly roll
was a risqué reference to the sex organs of both men and women. Buddy Bolden, it was said, “had the old moan in his cornet.” Bolden was famous for his trance-inducing performances, playing so holy it transformed the
juke
joints into churches, and so sexy his music could “make women jump out of the window.” Before each performance he used to say, “Let’s call the children home.”
Can I get a witness? Can I get a witness?

An optical viewer that diffracts light into beautiful geometric shapes
. The Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster modeled his 1817 invention on the telescope, calling it simply an instrument for observation of “rotating patterns of colored glass.” Turning it around and around in his hand, and then in his mind, he finally arrived at its melodic-sounding name by joining the mellifluous Greek words
kalos
, beauty,
eidos
, shape, and
skopeo
, to see or view. The words combine to create a marvelous little verbal machine, “an observer of beautiful forms.” Metaphorically, its adjectival form
kaleidoscopic
has come to mean an unexpectedly beautiful, playful, or fantastic display. Receiving a
kaleidoscope
as a gift from his publisher, Lord Byron appreciated not only its beauty but its metaphorical power, marveling at its “constantly changing patterns” in a letter from 1819. Describing his work habits, trumpeter Ornette Coleman said, “When I
have them working together, it’s like a beautiful
kaleidoscope
.” A distant cousin would be
telepathy
, which combines
telescope
and
pathos
, to suggest turning the lens of the soul on one’s “far-flung feelings.”

The
thrill
of deal-making, the excitement of anticipation, the enjoyment of prolonged pleasure
. An
untranslatable
but desirable word for the delicious, held-breath moment between the end of haggling and the consummation of a deal, between the turn of the last lap and reaching the tape at the end of a race, between the inspiration for the painting and the ecstatic initialing of the artist’s name, between the lifting of the loins and the climax in lovemaking. I caught this word in an article in
Smithsonian
magazine presenting the nefarious dealings of a looter of antiques, who described in near-erotic terms the
kavla
of the deal. The eponymic origins of the word go back to the city of the same name,
Kavla
, in ancient Greece, which was known for its rapturous customs for sealing a deal in its famed markets. Figuratively,
kavla
is now used for stretching out our most sensuous moments in order to make the pleasure of anticipation—rather than consummation—last as long as possible. Curious connection:
Kavla
, a Greek pop music group, retains a hint of the old meaning of the word in a few lines from the title song of its album: “Speaking and breathin’ like crazy / Only the feelings remain … (It’s
Kavla
).”

A figurative usage, usually a compound
metaphor
, mostly found in epic poetry
. Traditionally ill-defined as a circumlocution used where a good noun would do, a
kenning
is actually a noble member of the family of similes, metaphors, and riddles, what Seamus Heaney calls, in his
translation
of
Beowulf
, the “genius for analogy-seeking … and compound-making,” such as “word-hoard” for vocabulary. As epitomized by Norse-speaking Vikings and Anglo-Saxon bards, a classic kenning from
Beowulf
is “whale-road,” which vividly depicts the migration path of whales across the sea. In
Grendel
, John Gardner’s prose translation from the monster’s point of view, Gardner writes, “Such are the tiresome memories of a shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s
weird
roads.” Examples include “battle-sweat” for blood, “enemy of the mast” for wind, “raven-harvest” for death, “moons of the forehead” for eyes, and “storm of sands” for battle. Thus,
kennings
are metaphorical phrases that allow the writer and listener to
know
a thing better by describing it not so obviously, but allusively. Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien might appreciate his work even more knowing that he worked on the OED for a year in his twenties; one of his proud contributions was “horse-whale,” a vivid
kenning
for walrus. Speaking of which, it is well within our
ken
, our knowledge, to track its origin to the Old Norse
kenna
, to know, perceive, and the Germanic
kannian
, to be able. I am
keen
to try to keep this practice alive in my “wolf’s joint,” my wrist, so “Odin’s lip-stream,” my poetry, keeps running wild in my soul.

An outburst, a commotion, a tempest in a tumult.
Though the word is usually designated as obscure and unknown, a riffle through a Scottish
dictionary
reveals that it is an adaptation of
carfuffle
, derived from Scots
car
, which comes from Scottish-Gaelic
cearr
, wrong, awkward and
fuffle
, disheveled. Thus a
kerfuffle
is not only an outburst, but an awkward disruption, a badly motivated disturbance, a too-clever-by-half way of saying much ado about nothing. A CNET headline from summer 2009, “The
1984
Kindle Kerfuffle,” played off the alliteration. The author seems to be asserting that the
rhubarb
over censorship was no more than a
kerfuffle
in a teapot.

To put a lid on it, put a stop to, squelch.
A kinesthetic verb that knocks on whatever it modifies. To take the lid off the mystery of this old Gaelic word we need to hop across the pond, as the Irish say, and revisit the Irish funeral practice of placing a
kibosh
, a black cap, on the deceased, a solemn form of saying farewell. Across the Irish Sea, in England and on the continent, a black cap was often worn by judges passing a death sentence. Thus, to put the
kibosh
on someone is declare them as good as dead. The Irish fairy tale collector Padraic Colum explains the word in a letter to etymologist and dictionary maker Charles Earle Funk: “
Kibosh
, I believe means the ‘cap of death’ and it is always
used in that sense—‘He put the kibosh on it.’ In Irish it could be written
‘cie bais
,’—the last word pronounced ‘bosh,’ the genitive of
bas
, ‘death.’” A neoclassic citation comes from Crazy Joe DaVola in an episode of
Seinfeld
: “I know you bad-mouthed me to the execs at NBC, put the
kibosh
on my deal. Now I’m gonna put the
kibosh
on you. You know I’ve
kiboshed
before, and I will
kibosh
again.”