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August 18, 2005
For those who like words
I’ve told the story of huzzlecoo many times, but there are always those who haven’t heard. So, here it goes.
My cousin Jason was one of my heroes. Two years older than me, jack-of-all-trades, inexpressibly cool. He could pick out tunes on the piano, draw a picture while holding the paper on the top of his head, and always win at hide-and-go-seek.
One summer – I was probably about eight -- our family was visiting on vacation and my brother and I were hanging out with Jason, as we did whenever he was around and willing. We were in his room looking at various things when he pulled out a stack of index cards, saying they were vocabulary words he had to learn for school. On one of the cards was printed “huzzlecoo”. Did we know what it meant, he asked? No, we replied, wide-eyed at our cousin’s clearly superior lexical knowledge. “Heart-to-heart talk,” he said. My innocence and trust of Jason explain why I instantly accepted it as fact, but added to those was another reason word-lovers must approve: the sound of the word, almost onomatopoetic, matched the meaning he gave so perfectly. I couldn’t question it.
And for many years I didn’t. I think I was 15 or 16 before I turned to my brother one day and said, “Huzzlecoo’s not a real word, is it?”
My freshman year of college I was making a new e-mail account and my first name was already taken as an address, which deeply violated my sense of identity. To retaliate, I tried to think of a word or name no one could possibly have taken, and my memory lighted on huzzlecoo. Heart-to-heart talk. Appropriate for an e-mail address, I thought.
Four years before, at the age of 17, Jason had fallen asleep at the wheel, veered into a ditch and left us. So using “huzzlecoo” to identify myself is a means of treasuring (and sharing!) a dear memory – and a memorial to him.
| By huzzlecoo | 07:40 PM
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Comments
you'd think i would know that story, but i'm pretty sure i never heard it before. it's a good one--much more fulfilling than trying to explain your affinity for the word "frisky."
Posted by: jo leanne at August 23, 2005 02:56 PM
I knew that Huzzlecoo came from Jason, but did not know
the whole interesting story.
Posted by: Grandma Jane at August 26, 2005 01:46 PM
