Here’s another guy to pop into your lexicon so you can sound hip and young like me. Skosh! While structurally similar to zhuzh, skosh is its whole own thing. Skosh has a long ‘o’ like the ‘o’ in ‘ocean,’ as wonderfully pronounced by my good friend Merriam here.
Skosh means “a little bit,” and I almost always use it in the phrase, “just a skosh.” Tighten up the screw just a skosh, I’ll have just a skosh more coffee since the pot is hot, I can fit in a skosh of Animal Crossing before work, etc. This word pairs wonderfully with irony.
Pictured: The long ‘O’ of the ocean. Maybe a bit of a stretch, but look how cool those two arches are!
I don’t plan on this becoming an etymology blog, but it is just hard to avoid that certain words bring me great joy, and hearing people say words that I think I liked first and that I think they are saying because they heard me say it does a little thing to my brain that makes my brain want to have that happen more. Skosh actually comes to us from the Japanese word sukoshi, which means the same thing. Another great product of the cultural mixing that was the post-WWII era, American servicemen posted in Japan shortened the word to skosh, and I guess it stuck around since then, lying in wait to become popular again thanks to big name bloggers like myself. A true cultural icon and trendsetter.
Skosh is one of those words that kinda sounds made up by surfers in the 2000s, but once you know its etymology, all of a sudden it’s erudite. I love words that build the middle class. There seems to be a cycle of trends in words just like the ones in fashions and taste and baby names. What goes out of style comes back in every so often, with some truly unique new additions now and then. Unfortunately, not often does the saying a broken clock is right twice a day apply very well here. If you are wearing cargo shorts the whole time between them going out of style to being back in style, you have probably looked uncool pretty much the whole time. It feels nice that some of the words we use as slang or in special use cases have been around a while and have a cool energy to them. No shade to Vine (RIP), but I don’t love using some of the newest slang words like yeet all too often, but when I stumble across something that has an interesting origin story from before my time, I appreciate it all that much more.
Pictured: Obet & Del’s. My favorite coffee shop in LA! I’m referencing the coffee example from paragraph one, but don’t judge, this one was hard to gather pictures for.
This may seem like a funny topic, and I may be narrowcasting (narrowblogging?) to basically just my mom, but writing about words and etymology is definitely something I love. Language and how we use it slaps(good thing), and being able to gather joy just from the words we use everyday is too easy not to grab onto. It is the best thing about low-hanging fruit. It’s right there, go for it and eat that fresh orange.
I also appreciate narrowblogging - the term and the practice - especially when I’m the target💕🎯
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