"gook" (rhymes with "book")

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:09 PM -0500 3/18/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>Subject:      Re: "gook" (rhymes with "book")
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>At 7:48 PM -0500 3/18/05, sagehen wrote:
>>>Leaving aside "gook" and all the other /-oo-/ words -- like roof & root --
>>>that can go either way, I find that /k/ seems to be the most U-inspiring
>>>letter of the alphabet. I can come up off the top of my head with about 40
>>>/-oo-/ words  that sound the vowel as in "food." Only one of them ("spook")
>>>has a /k/.
>>
>>How about "kook"?  Maybe that gets an /u/ because it derives (by
>>clipping) from "kookie".  "Mook" (short for "Mookie", proper name) is
>>certainly so analyzable.
>>
>>Larry
>
>"Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb."
>
Exactly.  Edd (double-D) Byrnes, Route 66.  To my knowledge, he was
never "Kook", although he may have been by truncation, when the other
guys (what were their names?) were in a hurry.  But lower-case
"kook", for a crazy or just eccentric type, was definitely widespread
in the 60's.  First OED cite:

1960 Daily Mail 22 Aug. 4/5 A kook, Daddy-O, is a screwball who is
'gone' farther than most.

Daddy-O indeed.  Real gone, man.

Larry