Cuckoo for cockle puffs

I was talking with Bishop Desmond Tutu recently (okay, he was addressing a crowd of 4,000 of which I was a part, and I was talking with someone near me) when he (Bishop Tutu) used the phrase “cockles of my heart” and immediately admitted he didn’t know what that meant. A friend said to me “there’s a subject for your blog” and I dutifully am following through.

A cockle, at least since 1311, is a word for a mollusk, any one of a number of shellfish of the European species Cordium edule. The primary definition doesn’t explain the phrase because rarely are shellfish found in the heart. However, the phrase, which originated in 1669, has several possible sources. It could come from: 1. the similarity in shape of a cockle to a heart, or 2. from the Latin word corculum (although why I don’t know), or 3. from the Latin word coclea, which literally means snail but refers to a winding cavity. I think the latter is most likely, referring to a deep recess of the heart, listed as the third definition in my dictionary. The etymology of the word is through Middle English (cokel) from Old French (coquille) from the Latin conchilium which is from the Greek konchilion from which we also get the word conch.

Cockle sounds like cuckold, but has a very different meaning of the heart. The word cuckold comes originally from the Old French onomatopoetic word cucu, or coucou, which is the sound a bird makes. In Middle English, or about the mid-13th century, it was spelled cokewold. Its current definition (a man whose wife has committed adultery) derives from the female bird’s alleged habit of changing mates (or some birds’ authentic habit of leaving their eggs in other bird’s nests). The noun became a verb in the 1580s. And, yes, we get the word cuckoo from the same Old French word (and pronounce it koo-koo rather than kuck-oo because of its French roots).

If that doesn’t make you laugh (and there’s no reason why it should), it might at least make you chuckle. The word chuckle, according to my dictionary, probably came from the word chuck with the addition of the frequentative suffix –le. The same dictionary says chuck is echoic, the same as cluck (the sound a hen makes). Why it didn’t just refer me to cluck I can only assume is to keep the etymological development intact. My online reference doesn’t go through those contortions, merely stating that in 1598 it came to English from the Middle English chukken which refers to a clucking noise, and originally meant noisy laughter. My dictionary says cluck came from through the Middle English clokken from the Old English cloccian. Who knows? Who cares?

Additionally, etymonline.com recounts that Lewis Carroll, in his 1872 book “Through the Looking Glass”, coined the word chortle by combining chuckle and snort.

All of which certainly counts as taking us from the sublime to the ridiculous.