letters
to an unknown audience
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What a Nifty Web We Weave/  /May 19, 2006

On the field of sport, I've often heard the word, "juke," meaning to fake or jump in one direction: "I snagged the disc and ran straight at him, then juked to the left and he was totally on his ass!"

The word comes from Old Scots, "jouk," meaning "dodge."

It crops up, too, in the excellent phrase "jiggery-pokery," a corruption of the Old Scots phrase "joukery-pawkery," meaning dodging and trickery (a perfect name for a hacker's hack). The "pawk" part I'm not familiar with.

I first heard "jiggery-pokery" from one Mark Paschal, whose linguistic roots, I believe, hail from Tennessee.

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