Kamakawi Word of the Day

puke

• (v.) to be done, to be finished
• (v.) to finish (something)
• (adj.) finished
• (n.) closer (baseball)
• (n.) completion, end

Ka puke Tayalatá.
“October is done with.”

Notes: I totally forgot that I never acknowledged my terrible predictions for the 2010 MLB Playoffs. Oops! In short: Everything was wrong. Here’s what it looks like:

American League

ALDS

• Tampa Bay Rays def. Texas Rangers 3-0. Rangers win 3-2.
• New York Yankees def. Minnesota Twins 3-1. Yankees win 3-0.

ALCS

• Tampa Bay Rays def. New York Yankees 4-3. Rangers beat Yankees 4-2.

National League

NLDS

• Philadelphia Phillies def. Cincinnati Reds 3-1. Phillies win 3-0.
• Atlanta Braves def. San Francisco Giants 3-2. Giants win 3-1.

NLCS

• Atlanta Braves def. Philadelphia Phillies 4-1. Giants beat Phillies 4-2.

And in the World Series:

• Atlanta Braves def. Tampa Bay Rays 4-3. Giants beat Rangers 4-1.

To sum up, I was way, way off. Looking back at that playoff tree, though, I still don’t see how what happened happened. I mean, the Rangers beat the Yankees? Seriously?!

But oh well. Even though I’m a die hard Dodger fan, and the San Francisco Giants are my mortal enemies, I really like Tim Lincecum. Plus, they beat the Phillies, who ousted the Dodgers in the NLCS the past two years (possibly their best chance to win it all in…wow, quite awhile). So it’s all good.

Talk about false friends! I didn’t even realize this word looked like English “puke” until I went to enter it into my dictionary many, many years ago. But there’s nothing for it. It’s certainly not pronounced the same. And when you look at the iku there is no romanization, so no fuss, no muss.

This is one of those strange words that acts like an ergative verb. It can be used intransitively, and has a kind of objective meaning (if I’m using the right term there). Then you can use it transitively (without adding a causative) and get a causative meaning. It’s an old word, and commonly used, though, and so has gone through the ringer, so to speak, diachronically.

Oh, and there is no baseball in Kamakawi. I just thought it’d be cute to have a word for “closer” to throw in there (baseball tie-in. Weak, I know).

Hey, here’s a smiley!

Tags: abstract, actions, basic, concepts, humans, traits

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Dictionary, Foma, Ikunoala, P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.