Huckleberry
Did Mark Twain make up Huckleberry?
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People not from the south have probably not heard of it but, the huckleberry is actually a purplish-black berry that grows on a short stocky bush in the south. The berries are really really sour and not very edible. They are called huckleberries or hartleberries
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They are not very tasty by themself but they make a great cobbler.
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Yup, I read that it was called hurtleberries in England...and then us Americans mispronounced it to be huckleberries! :)
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Are you still considering Huckleberry as a name for your next child, Andrea? :)Whether or not Mark Twain created a unique name out of a slang expression, there is at least one baby name book on the market which "legitimizes" the name for modern-day use -- *The Penguin Classic Baby Name Book: 2,000 Names from the World's Great Literature*, by Grace Hamlin. You'll find an entry in there for "Huckleberry" as a choice for a boy's name.-- Nanaea
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Thanks, Nan. Yeah, I just love it!:)
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Tongue-molesAccording to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary the first written record of Huckleberry appeared in 1670. THe word is thought to be a corruption of Hurtleberry [from ‘heurtes (F), small Azure balls, tearmed (in Heraldry) hurts on men, and tongue-moles on women’].
Anagrams include "Blurry cheek"
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Ew! ew! ew!Ew!
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hehe :P
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Well, as a name, maybe. But it is a kind of berry, so he didn't make up the word.
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Thanks.:)
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Try this:
http://www.word-detective.com/back-w.htmlI know it wasn't *exactly* what you were asking;), but I thought it was pretty interesting.Melissa
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THanks, Melissa! These meanings are nicer than yours, Pavlos..."I'm your huckleberry" in a story about the Old West. Looking up the term in a dictionary, I found that in slang it meant "special man for the job" around 1880
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