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« on: August 18, 2004, 05:09:26 PM »
All right folks, due to someones misgivings (that someone shall remain anonymous. For privacy sake we shall call him Robert P) my word of the day is back. So here it is:
Cockaigne \kah-KAYN\, noun:
An imaginary land of ease and luxury.
Outside, in the dark, a wobbly patch of life upon the blue snow, the deer perhaps browsed, her soft blob of a nose rapturously sunk in the chilly winter greenery, her modest brain-stem steeped in some dream of a Cockaigne for herbivores.
--John Updike, Toward the End of Time
Everyone was seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit.
--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Cockaigne comes from Middle English cokaygne, from Middle French (pais de) cocaigne "(land of) plenty," ultimately adapted or derived from a word meaning "cake."
Trivia: References to Cockaigne are prominent in medieval European lore. George Ellis, in his Specimens of Early English Poets (1790), printed an old French poem called "The Land of Cockaign" (13th century) where "the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing."
Sounds to me like Mr.Ellis may have had a little Cockaigne while scribbling his poems down.......