chuckie appears to be un-American

[Dan Goodman]

Future newspaper headline from Robert A. Heinlein's novel _Time for the
Stars_:  "Up Hats, Chuckies!  Grandpa Towncomes."

>> The putatively "beautiful" Â and under-appreciated form "chuckie" is not in DARE, except as a call to chickens or pigs.
>
> It's funny (peculiar, and perhaps haha too), but I still get excited
> when I learn a new word. What makes this word chuckie beautiful to me
> is that even if I never say it again, and I don't expect I will, in my
> own private idiolect, cairns will always be built of chuckies (rounded
> quartz pebbles) and stones. And the notion that a body of poetry
> produced over a lifetime is like a cairn built over many seasons,
> stone by stone, pebble by pebble, strikes me as beautiful: "This
> collection adds another chuckie to the cairn of a remarkable poetic
> achievement."
>
> That's what I tried to share with you all.
>
> The idea that a cairn is built up over time, and that it is a way of
> remembering, is clear from this fine quotation in the OED:
>
> 1772    T. Pennant Voy. Hebrides 209 (Jam.)   As long as the memory of
> the deceased endured, not a passenger went by without adding a stone
> to the heap‥To this moment there is a proverbial expression among the
> highlanders allusive to the old practice; a suppliant will tell his
> patron, Curri mi cloch er do charne, I will add a stone to your cairn;
> meaning, when you are no more I will do all possible honor to your
> memory.

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