500 Daily Cockamamie It doesn’t matter where you live, there is always some strange vocabulary, circulating, floating around. New York City and other northeastern cities are notorious for all kinds of strange words. After all, New York City, had the grand distinction, of being called the great ‘Melting Pot’. While this is true, there were other cities like Boston, that were pretty close to and held a remarkable resemblance, when it came to the Melting Pot. Between the various forms and accents of broken English, it was hard enough, throw in some foreign words and terms and you got ‘a Hodge Podge. Can recall, working as a busboy in a local Italian restaurant, as a young lad. Had fun and liked the job. Never will forget two things in particular. 1. The waiters ripped me off. They were very sorry about it later. Though, once bitten, twice shy, held. Get a bad taste one way or another and it is all over. 2. One of the waiters pronounced oil, earl. Took, several days to figure out what he was saying! Then of course, we have the slangs and to top it off, slangs, in many languages. Somehow though, things did melt together and what originally, was taken as cockamamie; began to incorporate itself into the mainstream. Lets face it, you still, may not know the exact meaning of the word ‘Schmuck’, though, you do know, that it sounds enough like schnook, only worse! It was cockamamie, now simply another colloquialism. And nobody still, wants to be called a schmuck. Cockamamie, extends its bewilderment to much more than words. In fact, when you think about it, we default to its use every time that we really don’t know how to classify a thing. When the Germans, Italians, French and later the Japanese, began to export their cars to the USA, there was always created, a great hoopla in the very beginning of the course. . It was not a sometime occurrence, that the small cars were referred to as those ‘cockamamie cars’. We seem to have a knack of criticizing and putting down, that which we do not understand. An opinion is immediately formed; and we have determined that we just don’t like the thing. Perhaps, Bob Dylan put it best, ‘..you can’t criticize, what you can’t understand ..’ just thinkin’ about the VW, ‘Bug’. Boy, did some of us believe or make believe that we hated that thing .. We didn’t; we even missed it when it was gone. Heck, even new sports teams, got the treatment. The New York Mets, especially prior to their great 1969 season, were indeed referred to as, ‘that cockamamie baseball team’. The same held true for the Jets. The jets though, went from cockamamie, to slime! Mom, referred to tattoos, as those ‘cockamamies .. on his arms ..’ needless to say, she wasn’t a fan. Funny though, not everything falls right into the cockamamie pit. Take the wireless ‘portable’ transistor radio, people were fascinated by it. Sony, was hailed a big deal, an exotic delight. However, The Japanese, were considered cockamamie, go figure. Believe it or not the television, by some of the hard core resistance, was cockamamie too. Of course, the great majority, did get over it in their lifetime. Cockamamie, is so much an excuse, that we even have a term to describe. ‘ ..Come on ..enough of your cockamamie excuses .. !
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 00:27:29 +0000
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