Supposedly, the word cornobble means 'to hit someone in the head with a fish.'

What? Where? Who? Why?

Well, lexicographically, answers to those questions might not be forthcoming, because cornobble seems to be one of those stunt words, like blamestorming, that exists mostly because it's fun to tell other people what it means. (Call it lexical performance art.)

There is an 1890 glossary of Gloucestershire dialect that shows this (thank you Google Book Search!):



But whence the fish? How did this word go (possibly) from just a plain ol' beat-down with whatever was handy, to a very specific piscine assault?

I'm wondering (highly speculatively) if there was some sort of interference from *another* obsolete word, cor, which the OED defines as:

Salt cod, salt fish as distinguished from dry or stock-fish.

(Salt fish, being harder, would pack more of a wallop, but would not deliver the satisfying *thwack* that one assumes a fresh fish would.)

Obviously, just having those three letters in common doesn't mean there's really a connection, but it's the best I can come up with.

If you've seen this word in print, please leave a link in the comments! (The deleted Wikitionary article for this word has a link to the alumni magazine of the University of New Hampshire, but the link is truncated and a search of their site turns up nothing.)

Many thanks to Ben Zimmer, Grant Barrett, and Will Shortz for their helpfulness! And thanks to Kenton in Dayton for hitting me in the head with this word (metaphorically) in the first place ...

This entry was posted by Erin, on Friday, February 23, 2007. You can leave your response.