Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Cucurutxo with Gelat and Other Associations

On evenings when the temperature has dropped only two degrees Celsius on a thirty-two degree day, use it as an excuse to buy a cucurutxo with any flavored ice cream scoop topping you want. I like whip cream and coconut flavored gelat on my cucurutxo. This last word and sentence make me giggly because it sounds like I am making references to hanky-panky talk, but far from it. My fingers typed the sentence naturally on the keyboard as I thought of the image of a cucurutxo amb gelat.

Words fascinate me, especially those with strange articulations, rare mixes of consonants and vowels, or clashes of syllables. By now you have figured out cucurutxo means cone and gelat means ice cream in Catalan. Now stare at the image of the yummy ice cream cone and imagine the delightful sensations of eating  semi-frozen ice cream before I ruin what I have to say about this word in my wacky mind.

My marit and I split a cucurutxo that lasted only two minutes before it was all gone.
This cucurutxo is one scoop banana and one scoop coconut. The cone is very long.

I finished off this part.
The reason this word makes me giggly is because I don't associate it with the cone shaped wafer used to hold scoops of ice cream. I got a real kick out of this word when I first heard my mother in-law ask who wanted a cucurutxo for dessert. A cucu what? I had her repeat the word over and over until I could pronounce it. I try to use any excuse to say the word out loud (coo-coo-roo-chew). The only associations I have with the first four letters of this pleasurable word come from my Mexican Spanish.

1. Cucurrucucú Paloma by Tomás Mendez sung by Miguel Aceves Mejia.
2. Cucaracha (roach)
3. el Cucuy (bogeyman)

In my strange way I think of this Catalan word in the following contexts.

1. Step on that  cucurutxo! (insect)
2. I saw a cucurutxo roosting on a branch early this evening. (bird)
3. That darn rooster is cucurutxing again at six o'clock in the morning. (crowing)
4. Go to sleep or the cucurutxo is coming to get you! (bogeyman)
5. The northeastern part of the United States was once inhabited by the cucurutxo tribe. (Native Americans)

I can keep going with this examples of how the Catalan word for ice cream cone is fertile ground for my fanciful imagination, but why keep ruining the word with far fetched examples of nonsense, when all it means is ice cream cone. 
                                                 Gaudeix!



1 comment:

  1. Hi cousin, I just want to let you know that you just made
    my day. Your comment about about the Farewell summer and the Farewell Cucurutxo caught my attention!
    my first thought when I saw this picture of an icecream was
    "what does this have to do with the Cucurutxo"
    ( I have read about the Native American Tribes)
    Then after I got to the part where you related to your
    mexican spanish words.
    That's when I started laughing, OMG I totally understand your point
    , 25 years ago, my war with words started, when I arrived to the United States and I found
    out about the different varieties of spanish cultures, especially in L.A.
    So thank you for the good laugh.
    Yours Truly. Gricelda Han (Sanchez)

    ReplyDelete

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