• corker •
Printable Version Pronunciation: kawr-kêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. Someone who corks bottles. 2. (Regional slang) Something that brings finality, that puts an end to a matter, that 'puts a cork in' something. 3. (Regional slang) Something excellent, outstanding in its class or category.
Notes: Today's Good Word is most common today in New England, so it is a regional slang term. It often is accompanied by a prepositional phrase beginning with of: you can tell a corker of a story or experience a corker of a storm. Any way you use it, it indicates that the noun it modifies is an outstanding example of its class.
In Play: If you travel about Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, you are apt to hear sentiments expressed like this: "I hear that the alphaDictionary Good Words are a corker of a word-of-the-day series." Well, that's the way we dream of it. "That story you told about climbing Mt. Everest was really a corker—whether it was true or not."
Word History: The word cork came to English from Spanish corcho "cork", the Spanish descendant of Latin quercus "oak". Quercus is a descendant of PIE *perkwu-/*porkwu- "oak" in which the [p] became [kw] under the influence of the [kw] in the following syllable. Since PIE [p] became [f] in Germanic languages, we would expect descendants of this same root in these languages containing firh- and forh- in them, which points the finger to the ancestors of English fir and forest, assuming the [h] disappears everywhere in English except in initial position.
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