All You Need Is…

According to Jackie Corley, writer and publisher of WordRiot.org, in an interview featured at the super Absolute Write, with practice, anyone can become a wordsmith. “But it takes something more to be a writer. It takes cajones.”

Yeah, right.

Cojones is the body part of choice used to express such diverse states and activities as literally having balls (guts) (tener cojones), getting up people’s noses (tocar los cojones), sitting around on your butt doing bugger all (tocarse los cojones). And, as we wrote in In The Garlic, the word is probably doomed forever to be muddled by foreigners with cojines (cushions) and cajones (drawers – the furniture). There isn’t a foreign speaker of Spanish in the world who doesn’t have an embarrassing cajón/cojín/cojón tale to tell. (Theresa’s, which involved a Christmas play, a class of kids, and a pile of cushions, is in the book).

So I was both delighted and incredulous to have found a very public written example. But obviously the first interesting point is that the word cojones in its ‘guts’ meaning has entered the English language in the US as a slang term.

I fell about with laughter for a bit. Then I checked out with Wikipedia: cojones was famously used in 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then serving as the USA’s ambassador to the United Nations, in the aftermath of the downing of an Hermanos al Rescate light civilian aircraft by Cuban airforce MiG 29s on 24 February. Following the release of a transcript of radio traffic between the fighter pilots in which one exclaimed, ¡Le partimos los cojones! (“We busted his balls!”), Albright offered the following comment: “Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.” Albright later described the vulgarism as “the only Spanish word I know”.

Cajones is a very frequent mispelling, and is sometimes used as a euphemism for cojones. An English speaker would pronounce them more or less the same.

Then I googled ‘cajones’. Amongst the websites devoted to ‘wooden box drums’ (a second meaning alongside drawers) was this:

Bush Admires Blair’s “Cajones”

And this: Do “Big Cajones” Help You Succeed in the Stock Market?

Now, to my ears, Big Cajones is beginning to sound like a rather fabulous nickname for a grizzled sidekick in a B movie of a wannabe Steinbeck-esque Great American Novel. Which I’ll be writing myself, cajones permitting.