a whole nother

I've been wanting to revive this blog for awhile now to include posts that cover broader topics in linguistics and words (not just whole nother - which, by the way, I've already heard twice today and it's barely 12:30). Every time I think of a potential post, I usually talk myself out of posting it on the grounds that it's insignificant or unimportant.

But that all changed yesterday when I came across an Associated Press story that appeared in the Seattle Times: President Bush talks "kerfuffle". The article begins:

President Bush is known as a plainspoken man, a straight-talker. So how did a word like "kerfuffle" come out of his mouth?

He dropped the K-bomb during an open question and answer session in Cleveland yesterday. According to the transcript found on whitehouse.gov, President Bush responded thus to a question about wiretapping:

No, I appreciate the question. He's talking about the terrorist surveillance program that was -- created quite a kerfuffle in the press, and I owe an explanation to.

The Associated Press story also says that

An aide said he has heard Bush use the word privately before, but not in public.

According to the OED, kerfuffle is as young as the 1940s, but its Scottish variant curfuffle dates back to the early nineteenth century. The shift from curfuffle to kerfuffle probably happened by way of analogy with other words that begin with ker. According to the OED, ker- is

"the first element in numerous onomatopoeic or echoic formations intended to imitate the sound or the effect of the fall of some heavy body, as kerchunk, -flop, -plunk, -slam, -slap, -slash, -souse, -swash, -swosh, -thump, -whop, etc."

It seems as though President Bush has taken very large, heavy object - the wiretapping controversy, in this case - positioning it above a body of water or an unassuming small insect and then dropping said object. Kerplunk. Kerchunk. Kerfuffle.