Sunday Word: Cockamamie

[sallymn]

cockamamie [kok-uh-mey-mee]

noun:
(Informal, slang) ridiculous, pointless, or nonsensical

Examples:

They came up with this cockamamie story about bullying basically - it was basically dog-whistling, that I was bullying my partner. (Sam Moore, Danny John-Jules hits out at 'filthy' Strictly Come Dancing, The IndependentMarch 2022)

Before sharing with investors yet another cockamamie report, Holmes added the corporate logos of two venerable laboratories, Schering-Plough and Pfizer, though neither lab knew anything of the report. (David Von Drehle, On trial, Elizabeth Holmes keeps playing the smoke-and-mirrors game, The Washington Post, November 2021)

To paraphrase the writer Nelson Algren, never play cards with a man called Doc; never eat at a place called Mom's; never trust a movie that requires a ton of portentous narration to set up a cockamamie story. (John Anderson, 'Infinite' Review: A Not-So-Pleasant Trip Down Memory Lane , The Wall Street Journal, June 2021)

Origin:

American English slang word attested by 1946, popularized c 1960, but said to be New York City children's slang from mid-1920s; perhaps an alteration of decalcomania (see decal). There is a 1945 recorded use of the word apparently meaning a kind of temporary tattoo used by children. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Cockamamie - something ridiculous, incredible or implausible - is an intrinsically funny word, but it's truly incredible that word historians believe it's a close relative of decal, a design prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be the case.)

The original of both cockamamie and decal is the French décalcomanie, which was created in the early 1860s to refer to the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines décalquer, to transport a tracing, with manie, a mania or craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain ' it's recorded in the magazine The Queen on 27 February 1864: 'There are few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as decalcomanie'. It reached the United States around 1869 and - to judge from the number of newspaper references in that year - became as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word was quickly Anglicised as decalcomania and in the 1950s it became abbreviated to decal.

The link between decalcomania and cockamamie isn't proved, but the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the other. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period, using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum. Shelly Winters wrote of cockamamie in The New York Times in 1956 that 'This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie a decalcomania is stared at.'

Quite how the word changed sense to mean something incredible is least clear of all. An early sense was of something inferior or second-rate, which presumably referred to the poor quality of the cheap transfers. It might have been influenced by words such as cock-and-bull or poppycock. Anyone who adopted the craze for sticking transfers on oneself may have been regarded by adults or more serious-minded youngsters as silly - certainly the first sense was of a person who was ridiculous or crazy; the current sense came along a few years later. (World Wide Words)