My friends and I adore your column and read it every week before the festivities begin at Captain White’s Oyster Bar and Clog Palace. Recently we were discussing a word we’ve all heard but have never seen in print. It’s pronounced “skosh” (long “o”). Whenever I ask somebody to spell it, they always say, “you mean as in ‘a skosh more room’?” I contend that it’s not a real word but was created solely for the purpose of a jeans commercial (I’m not sure which brand). Enlighten us, Cecil, and we’ll tell you what a Clog Palace is. –Julie Mangin, Silver Spring, Maryland
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You figure you’re going to tell me? How sweet. Cecil first heard “skosh”–you spelled it correctly–from a printer in Tucson, Arizona, who applied it to any quantity smaller than a centimeter and larger than an angstrom. This fellow had learned his trade in the Navy and had picked up an abundance of off-the-wall weights and measures from his fellow craftsmen. Another example was the “glug,” a liquid measure–you wanted two glugs of something, you turned the bottle upside down until it went “glug, glug.” Skosh had a slightly more respectable origin: it derived from the Japanese sukoshi, little. United Nations troops first picked it up during the Korean War, presumably while on R and R in Japan, and it’s been part of military slang ever since.
Just goes to show you, Theodore, there’s good in all of us–even a festering bucket of slime such as yourself. You’ve undoubtedly pinpointed the origin of the horse-statue myth. Others say they also heard it first at Gettysburg. Turning to Gettysburg: The Complete Pictorial of Battlefield Monuments by D. Scott Hartwig and Ann Marie Hartwig (1988), we find photos of six freestanding horse statues (478 monuments and memorials are pictured all told). Sure enough, all six conform to the code you describe, except that the horse of General John F. Reynolds, who was killed at Gettysburg, has one foreleg and one hind leg raised, not both forelegs.
