cacafuego

The Cacafuego getting its arse kicked by The Golden Hind.

You might know a cacafuego – it’s a swaggering braggart or boaster. Even if you’re not a linguist you’ve probably guessed that this is a Spanish word. And it literally means ‘fire shitter’, from the old Spanish verb cacar (now cagar), meaning ‘to void excrement’, and fuego, which means ‘fire’.

Cacafuego first appeared in English in the early 1600s, and that’s down to Sir Francis Drake, English explorer, sea captain, ahem, slave trader, naval officer, politician and circumnavigator of the globe (show-off). He was also a privateer, which is basically a government-sponsored pirate who went around attacking foreign vessels and stealing all their treasure. One of the ships he captured was a Spanish galleon called Cacafuego. Okay, the ship wasn’t actually called fire shitter (shame) – this was a nickname given to her by her crew due to her impressive cannon fire and other weaponry. Her real name was Nuestra Señora de la Concepción or Our Lady of the (Immaculate) Conception, which isn’t half as fun.

On 1 March 1579, while doing the aforementioned circumnavigation of the globe, Drake’s ship the Golden Hind caught up with Cacafuego near Ecuador. Having heard that she was packed to the rafters (not sure ships have rafters but never mind) with goodies, Drake decided to capture her. Rather than reduce the Hind’s sails in daylight (as this might look suspicious), Drake trailed some wine barrels behind to slow her down and wait for night to fall. In the early evening he came alongside and, because there weren’t many English ships in the Pacific at this time, the Cacafuego was taken completely by surprise and surrendered without much resistance. Drake sailed both ships to the South America coast and, after nicking all the treasure, treated the officers on board to a nice dinner, some presents (sadly Wikipedia doesn’t say what these were) and letters of safe conduct before offloading them. So that’s nice. And it wasn’t long before cacafuego became a byword for a swaggering person – probably due to the fact that Drake made such short work of taking control of such a supposedly impressive ship.

jiggery-pokery

I used this word in last week’s post, and a friend pointed out that it’s a bit of an odd one. So I thought I’d look into it a bit further. And it turns out it has a pretty interesting backstory (so thanks, Lorna).

Jiggery-pokery means dishonest or suspicious activity. It hit the headlines in 2015 when American Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used it in a legal argument against his colleagues’ reasoning in a decision about Obamacare, accusing them of ‘interpretive jiggery-pokery’. This quintessentially British phrase isn’t used that much outside of our shores, and certainly not in American legal writing (although Scalia has form for using these types of words – apparently he wrote the word ‘argle-bargle’ in another decision previously). The earliest-known use of jiggery-pokery in writing was in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1845. But it goes back much earlier than that.

The first part comes from a Scottish word, ‘jouk’, which means to twist your body to avoid a blow. This later became ‘joukery’ or ‘jookery’ to describe underhand dealing or trickery. The second part comes from ‘pawky’, another Scottish word which means something is artfully shrewd (a ‘pawk’ is a trick). By 1686, some bright spark combined the two to come up with ‘joukery-pawkery’, used to refer to clever trickery or sleight of hand. You can find this in Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Black Dwarf (which doesn’t sound very PC):

‘…I canna shake mysell loose o’ the belief that there has been some jookery-paukery of Satan’s in a’ this…’

It wasn’t long before joukery-pawkery morphed into the more familiar jiggery pokery we get today.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, ‘argle-bargle’ is copious but meaningless talk or writing, or waffle.)

gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of boundaries of electoral districts or constituencies to swing an election a particular way. A good example is when the 19th-century Republican Party split the Dakota Territory into two states instead of one. That’s because each state got at least three electoral votes, regardless of the size of its population.

The OG gerrymander

Gerrymandering is named after one Elbridge Gerry, an American founding father, politician and diplomat who was the fifth vice president from 1813 until he died in 1814. He was also the governor of Massachusetts. During his second term, Republican-controlled legislation created district boundaries designed to increase the party’s control of state and national offices. This lead to some oddly shaped legislative areas, including one in Essex County (a political stronghold for the rival party, the Federalists) that a newspaper said looked like a ‘salamander’ (obvs). They named it the ‘Gerry-mander’ after Elbridge who signed the legislation that created it.

It worked as well – the weirdly shaped district elected three Democrat-Republicans that year. Previously the county had had five Federalist senators.

It’s worth pointing out that apparently Elbridge wasn’t happy about this suspect map redrawing, even if he did still sign the legislation that made it happen. According to his biographer he was ‘a nervous, birdlike little person’ with a stammer, and a habit of ‘contracting and expanding the muscles of his eye’ (I can’t even imagine what that actually looked like). This makes him sound like he might have been bullied into it, but he was no stranger to not signing stuff – in fact he refused to put his name to the American Constitution because he thought the Senate it created could become too tyrannical. So perhaps he would have thought twice about signing that district-redrawing bill if he’d known that two-hundred-and-something years later his name would have become synonymous with this type of cloak-and-dagger political jiggery pokery.

(Gerrymander is an example of an ‘eponym’ or a word named after a person. Check out this post for lots more eponyms, including leotard, diesel and bloomers. Sounds like a party…)

(DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of American politics is shockingly bad. So apologies in advance if any of my facts or terminology are wrong.)