The podictionary word for today is widget:  Widgets are popping up on our computer screens.  Well, the little coded applications that drop into websites and desktop dashboards are called widgets, but the word widget is older than any of our computer screens.  I see conflicting first citations for widget in 1920 and 1931. 

No matter, the word is definitely an Americanism and one point about it is, that it shows that it isn’t only the deep dark reaches of Old English that pose a mystery to us when it comes to getting a hold on clear etymological histories.  This word leaves ‘em guessing.  The 1931 citation is the OED’s and I can at least confirm that it landed in writing as a result of a researcher named Louise Pound at the University of Nebraska who accumulated a long list of, as she put it “American indefinite names” that she said she collected mostly by word of mouth. 

So there isn’t much context there.  You know that from this time forward lexicographers and etymologists are going to have an easier time with sussing out the origins of new words, since not only are all the written records electronic and much more searchable, but also with instant messaging and social networking, the written word is becoming increasingly casual.  So that what once remained in the oral tradition for years or even centuries before laying a traceable history, is now appearing in days or even hours. 

Even spoken word might get caught in this net as software turns YouTube transcripts into text for easy analysis.  Anyway, everywhere that I checked that ventured a guess on the etymology of widget guessed it might have been an alteration on gadget.  Now with gadget we have a little more to go on; but not much.  The first citation is from a book called Spunyarn & Spindrift about a boy’s working trip on ship to China and back from England in the 1880s.  As with widget in that university researcher’s report, the book lists gadget among a bunch of other words used by the sailors for things that they didn’t know the names of. This wasn’t a particularly famous book and so the word wasn’t exactly out there in popular use. 

The next citation was from a guy who was a little less obscure.  His name was Rudyard Kipling and he had an enormous readership so that an attractive word like gadget just had to catch on.  Since Kipling was born in India and spent a fair number of his days sailing the bounding main, it is conceivable that he picked up this word also aboard ship.  The dictionaries speculate that it might have come from a French word for a hook or some other little component of machinery.  Surfing around looking for a tale to tell about Rudyard Kipling I stumbled instead across one about William James, brother of Henry James.  Both Rudyard Kipling and William James lived in a time of English world supremacy. 

One of the things that Kipling wrote about was how England had to maintain the use of force, or at least the threat of it to uphold civilization in general.  I’m not sure I agree with that, but one day William James was sitting on a horse drawn bus traveling into Boston and thinking about these writings of Kipling’s when he was annoyed by a singing child in the bus.  He asked the mother to get the kid to stop.  The mother ignored him but another guy on the bus asked James how he dared offend the woman that way.  James, thinking of Kipling’s justification of force, said that if the guy said it again, James would slap him. 

Of course the guy did say it again and James felt forced to do the slapping.  The outcome of course was a flourishing of business cards—well in those days they weren’t business cards, they were calling cards—from the other passengers telling the guy who got slapped that they’d stand as witnesses if he wanted to press charges.  Now I think that contrary to Kipling’s opinion, this shows civilization standing firm in spite of the use of force.

The podictionary word for today is craft:  Most times I haul groceries back from the store they are in plastic bags.  But sometimes I get them in those brown paper bags.  In the paper trade, that kind of paper is known as kraft paper; kraft with a K.  This is from Swedish and means “strong.”  And this is a clue to the roots of our English word craft with a C.  Our English word is of Germanic stock, just like the Swedish word, so it is Old English. 

In modern English the word has a number of meanings including as a verb the care you take in building something and as a noun either a vehicle or even a sort of profession.  People who are crafty are either sneaky or—on the flip side: arty and creative—like the crafty chica.  Back in the dark of Old English craft had yet another meaning; similar the Swedish Kraft the Old English craft originally meant “strength” and “power”; “might” and “force.”  But even as we see the first citations appearing in English, already that bicep flexing sense of craft is joined by a more intellectual sense of strength, and with it mental skill. 

By 1000 years ago already a piece of art might be called a craft.  But were strength can be used to the good, it can be used to the bad as well and even before then craft was being used to describe “cunning” and “deceit” as well.  It wasn’t until around 400 years ago that vehicles began to be called crafts, and of course the first vehicles were boats.  Now we have aircraft and spacecraft, but at first it seems that the application of the word craft was to the skill of the boatmen. 

The name of the skill, seems to have rubbed off on the tools they used with those skills.  So much so that not only were boats called craft, but so were nets and boat hooks and ropes for a while.  The American Heritage Dictionary says that craft has been used as a verb since Old English, but I can only find Middle English citations in the OED.  According to American Heritage the meaning of the verb craft was most strongly associated with pursuits of literature.  That means you can craft a novel but not a bylaw.  Their usage panel, who judges the propriety of English words felt as follows:
Seventy-three percent of the Usage Panel accepted the phrase beautifully crafted prose. But, only 35 percent accepted planners crafted their proposal.

Fittingly Geoffrey Chaucer said
That lyf so short, / the craft so long to lerne

The podictionary word for today is atheist: 
The word atheist is defined by the OED as the disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God.  The word comes from Greek roots, although English seems to have gotten the word from French. Atheist is different from agnostic, that also has Greek roots. 

The literal translation of agnostic is “unknowing” “unknown” or “unknowable.” So that an agnostic is making no pronouncement one way or the other while an atheist is making a definite pronouncement; that they believe there is no God.  The Greek root words support this with a literal meaning of “without god” or “denying god.”  The first citations for atheist and atheism are 1571 and 1587 respectively, putting the works they appeared in at publication during the time that William Shakespeare was a youth and young man.  I noted that both these citations are from the pen of the same author; a guy named Arthur Golding. 

And it turns out that Arthur Golding has more connections to Shakespeare.  Because the word atheist appears there 400 years ago, it struck me that there have been religious doubters around for longer than just the last few decades.  When I learned that Arthur Golding was a major translator of classical texts into English, I thought about the Greek roots to the word atheism and wondered if the word stemmed from religious doubters thousands of years ago. 

But it turns out that Golding was a pretty strong puritan and it was in some of his other, non-translation work where he first uses these words—and in a decidedly negative tone.  So there’s no evidence in this particular etymological hunt that points to ancient Greek atheists railing against the heavens.  And the word seems also to only have turned up in French around the same time, just over 400 years ago.  It is Golding’s work as a translator of classical texts is what connects him to Shakespeare. 

One source claims that most of what was known about the classical world at the time of Shakespeare was sourced from Golding’s work.  Since Shakespeare leans heavily on the classics in several of his plays, the implication raises Golding’s stature for people who’ve never heard of him before.  You likely know that for years there were books written and claims made that there never really was a guy named William Shakespeare, and that some other guy, or group of people, had produced all his work. 

It turns out that Golding had a nephew who is one of the prime candidates for a Shakespeare stand in.  His name was Edward de Vere but now-a-days most people would think you were, if not an atheist, at least a heretic, if you claimed Shakespeare never really existed.  Which brings me to the tone associated with the word atheist.  Golding not withstanding, in some circles today the word atheist is an insult and stimulates strong reaction.  The Oxford thesaurus includes words like heretic, heathen, and infidel as synonyms. 

I note that for both atheist and agnostic on Urbandictionary there are a high number of user votes, making me think that moral issues are still very important even to people who use such a slangy and irreverent website.  This is an area that stirs passions.

The podictionary word for today is Webster: I was poking around and came across an announcement of a museum exhibition of a collection of dictionaries. The line that caught my eye read “including the controversial Webster’s Third International of 1961.” Controversial? A dictionary? You’re darn tootin’.

Today you can get a dictionary that says Webster’s on the cover from a number of different publishing companies. Webster has sort of made the shift from brand to generic. It’s not quite like Kleenex or Jell-O but its close. It started with Noah Webster, born 1758 in Connecticut. Have you ever been bugged by one of those people who keep telling you aren’t using an expression in the right way, or tell you that you pronounced a word wrong. Once in a while they can be helpful, but it can get on your nerves when it goes on and on. It seems that Noah Webster was one of those guys. But now that we are safely out of range of his lifetime we can look back with respect at the achievements that came from his nitpicky nature. I see that his father had been a farmer and a weaver.

That’s appropriate since the family name Webster is actually another old word for a weaver. Noah Webster himself had an opinion. By that I mean he thought he’d figured things out and he wanted everyone else to do things his way. His opponents called him names. Here are some quotes I found on wikipedia for what that’s worth. He was called

• a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot
• an incurable lunatic
• a deceitful newsmonger
• Pedagogue and Quack
• a traitor to the cause of Federalism
• a toad in the service of sans-cullottism
• a prostitute wretch
• a great fool, and a barefaced liar
• a spiteful viper
• a maniacal pedant

His fierce opinions led him, among other things to produce a book on the right way to spell words and later a really, really good dictionary; better than old Samuel Johnston’s in many ways, and a bit of a precursor to the Oxford English Dictionary. In particular it was an AMERICAN dictionary. Time passed and Noah went to the great lexicographer’s convention in the sky where he may be arguing yet. But back here on earth other folks picked up the task of keeping dictionaries up to date.

Toward the end of the 1950s this task fell to Philip Babcock Grove, at least when it came to updating the by-then enormous Webster’s International dictionary. Grove had a different outlook on words than old Noah did. Whereas Noah was among those who knew there was a right way and a wrong way to express yourself—in fact he was pretty well leader of the pack in that department—Philip Grove took the stance that it wasn’t his job to TELL people how to communicate, but rather his job was to REPORT on how they did it.

If someone said “ain’t” in conversation, then he figured it had better go in the dictionary, even if lots of people looked down their noses at such a word. He also swept piles of useful information that the earlier versions of Webster’s had contained, out of the third edition and into other publications. This pissed a few people off, but it was his reporter’s attitude that got most of the pedants up on their hind legs with him. The pendulum had swung. Where old Noah had been called down for being too strict, Philip Grove was dissed for not being strict enough—or maybe not being strict at all. In fact a whole bunch of concerned citizens marched off, and it’s said, created the American Heritage Dictionary because they were so annoyed.

The podictionary word for today is galvanized: If you go to the hardware store you can buy big rough looking bolts and things that are sort of a grey color and are said to be galvanized. When a person is galvanized they are not encased in metal, but prepared or stimulated for action. This word has split in at least three directions and it’s all the fault of another old Italian who was playing with electricity more than 200 years ago.

Knowing that steel and iron objects are galvanized to prevent them from rusting, I always had assumed that when someone was galvanized they were sort of prepared and so protected when they went into a challenging situation. Because of my background as an electrical engineer I was also aware that things like mag wheels get pitted and corroded due to something called galvanic corrosion. In fact, when oil companies want to prevent their off shore oil drilling rigs to get rusty in the salt water of the sea, they don’t galvanize them, instead they sometimes strap big aluminum chunks to the steel structures so that the galvanic corrosion works for them and eats away at the aluminum instead of rusting the steel.

Galvanic corrosion involves a current running through salt water based on the differing electrical properties of dissimilar metals. All this led me to think that those galvanized bolts in the hardware store must have been put in some bath of chemicals and charged electrically somehow. But in all these assumptions I was wrong wrong wrong. Back in the late 1700s there was a guy called Luigi Galvani who surprised himself and everyone else when he was trying dissecting a frog and turned to another task when a colleague came over and picked up the scalpel and touched a nerve in the severed legs of the frog. Low and behold the legs started kicking.

Wondering why this might have happened he made note of the fact that on the same table he had some electrical equipment and perhaps a charge had gotten onto the scalpel. Luigi then undertook various experiments such as pinning frogs’ legs to an iron latticework in his garden to see if they would kick during thunderstorms. They did, but they seemed to kick even when he did this and the weather was clear. He came up with a theory that the brain generates electricity that flows down and shocks the muscles. It is from this theory that when we now say someone becomes galvanized. It isn’t—as I assumed—that they have some sort of protective coating, it’s that they are shocked into action.

Yesterday I talked about the word battery and Alessandro Volta. Actually Volta tried to reproduce Galvani’s experiments and found that sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t. Pinning the frog’s legs to the iron grate using brass pins as Galvani had done worked fine, but pinning them with iron pins didn’t work at all. It was this fact that suggested to Volta the train of thought about differing metals and led to his invention of the battery.

Although we call this a galvanic effect, old Galvani actually didn’t have any idea the electricity had to do with differing metals. To add to the confusion, those galvanized bolts at the hardware store are hot dipped in zinc, not charged in any way. What’s an armchair etymologist to do?

The podictionary word for today is battery:  Yesterday I talked about the word cell.  I doing so it occurred to me that batteries are often called cells.  Those tiny ones are triple A cells.  The big fat ones for flashlights are C cells or D cells. 

I also wondered about any potential connection between the battery that powers my camera and the legal term assault an battery.  Here’s what I found out.  Assault and battery is closer to the historical source of battery than a flashlight battery, but the two are in fact connected.  A charge of assault and battery involves the physical touching of one person by another and it is a connection to the word beating that brings battery into this phrase.  This meaning is the first that appears in English back almost 500 years ago from French.  Clearly one can receive a beating not only from someone else’s hands, but also from their weapons and this also was the meaning in French and English referring to what one group might do to another with cannon. 

From this, the place where the cannons were set up was called the battery and so Battery Park in New York is named.  Because in such places and in such battles it was often a group of cannon working together that gave the battering, the word battery took on a sort of collective meaning. Hence we get our eggs from battery hens.  These aren’t hens that run on batteries, but hens that are all cooped up together.  So battery has a sense of a collection or gathering of things.  Now for a little side track back to cell.  In the year 1800 a guy named Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta presented a paper to the London based Royal Society. 

In it he told of his invention of the first electrical battery.  He took a wine glass and filled it with salt water and stuck two pieces of metal into it, not letting them touch. These two pieces were different metals and the basic difference in their metallic properties meant that he could measure a small charge between them.  He tried a bunch of different metals and he liked the results best when he used silver and zinc.  If you know anything about batteries you’ll have already figured out that the charge he was able to measure is today calculated in volts, and it’s no coincidence that his last name was Volta.  Anyway, this wine glass arrangement didn’t exactly result in any charge that was useful for anything at the time.  And because it was so small it was kind of hard to measure anyway. 

So he emptied his whole cabinet of wine glasses and filled them all with salt water and stuck little tabs of metal into all of them.  Then he hooked a wire from the silver tab in one, to the zinc tab in the next, and so on until all of the little charges added up to a bigger charge that he could more easily detect.  Each of the individual glasses are what in a high school science lab would now be called cells, and of course the collection of all of them together is what we call a battery.  So next time you stuff 12 D cells into your ghetto blaster you’ll know that technically at least, it only contains one battery.

The podictionary word for today is cell:  I remember the first time I heard the phrase cell phone.  A question flashed through my mind, what’s all this fuss about telephones in prisons? Much more recently I heard that there is a big problem with cell phones in prisons, in that although they are usually officially not allowed, prisoners are having them smuggled in and are conducting their criminal business from the comfort of their cells. 

In English the word cell appears in the written record just on the cusp where Old English turns into Middle English.  The first appearance is only 65 years after the arrival of French with William the Conqueror and that first citation refers to a cell as being a dwelling for monks or nuns.  Since such religious people would have earlier been writing in Latin there is a possibility that this is an Old English word that evolved from Latin, although most of the dictionaries I checked seemed to feel the Latin root of cell ties more strongly back through the Norman French link.  In either case, just like in English now, way back in Latin the ancestor of cell held many meanings. 

The ancient Romans weren’t using cell phones, but they did apply the parent word to small rooms in a lager house, prison cells and the divisions that bees make within a honeycomb.  There is a suggestion in the Oxford English Dictionary that some etymologists feel that the word might even relate to the wax in the honeycomb which in Latin was called cera.  The OED doesn’t push this point at all and I don’t see much support for it elsewhere.  The American Heritage Dictionary points instead back to an Indo-European root kel that meant to hide or cover up. 

It is pretty self evident why a prison cell would be called a cell, but why are cell phones called cell phones?  Cell phones work because they use radio waves to constantly check in with a nearby antenna tower.  As you drive across town you move away from one tower and toward another and the system is engineered so that the first tower stops taking your calls as the second tower starts picking them up.  The ranges of territory surrounding each of these antennas are called cells.  Even as an engineer I think that’s a pretty geeky reason to call cell phones cell phones. 

The word cell is also used to describe a group of terrorists, although that use of cell didn’t emerge until 1925 and at that point didn’t refer to terrorist cells, but communist cells.  And of course our bodies are made up of cells as we studied in biology.  The first citation for this use of cell is remarkable because it came in an anatomy book, but it wasn’t Gray’s Anatomy—now with a whole new meaning beyond the text book—it was instead Grew’s Anatomy.  That’s G R E W. 

Nehemiah Grew made his name studying the anatomy of plants and vegetables, so I guess Grew is an appropriate name.  In 1672 he described the divisions within the bodies of plants as cells.  These days when someone is called a renaissance man they are being complemented in being seen as having a really broad understanding of many fields of knowledge.  I’ve heard it said that the real renaissance was the last time anyone could have expected to actually absorb and understand all of human knowledge.  Now-a-days someone smart and accomplished usually has achieved success in one or two narrow niches of knowledge.  Back then if you were smart I guess you were expected to be smart in lots of fields. 

Although he lived 100 or more years after the renaissance, this might explain why Nehemiah Grew, who came to prominence studying plants, was able to turn this reputation into a medical practice treating human patients.  Before I go I thought I’d mention that I notice wikipedia refers to Nehemiah Grew as one of the pioneers of dactyloscopy, which I find is 75 cent word for “the study of fingerprints.”

The podictionary word for today is graffiti: On those rare occasions when I bestir myself to get up and out of the house and go down town, I can take in graffiti sprayed onto a number of blank walls as well as seemingly inaccessible building sides well above street level. They would be blank walls I suppose, if they weren’t covered with graffiti. There are differing opinions on whether this graffiti is defacement of property or art. The New Oxford American Dictionary says graffiti is writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place which puts them in the defacement camp I guess.

At Urbandictionary.com, there appear to be endless diatribes about how this pure art form is oh so misunderstood. They are clearly in the art camp. The first citation for the word graffiti in the Oxford English Dictionary is very recent; in the 1970s. This would appear to support an impression that graffiti is a phenomenon of modern times. But as you might have seen in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, graffiti has been around for a little longer than most would suspect. Graffiti sounds like it might be an Italian word like spaghetti or linguini and in fact we do get graffiti the word from Italian.

Actually graffiti is the plural of graffito, but if you looked at a single painting up there on the brickwork and complained about the graffito people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. A number of dictionaries I consulted went on a some length justifying why it was more or less acceptable to use the plural incorrectly; but the fact is, English is a language that makes up the rules as it goes along and if enough people call a graffito graffiti, then that’s what it is. Graffito appears a fair bit earlier in the OED with a first citation of 1851. It wasn’t that the streets of London or New York were being defaced back then.

Graffiti was the word used by archeologists, antiquarians and historians to describe the scratchings, drawings and paintings of prehistory. Back in Italian graffio was a scratch. Further back this word finds roots through Latin and Greek into Indo-European and is unsurprisingly related to words like graphic and graphite. In the Egyptian desert, caravans and travelers though prehistory left their marks on remote stones in the wilderness for much the same reason that Urbandictionary claims graffiti is left today—to say “I was here.”

The word graffiti is also used to describe art from the renaissance that uses a technique of two or more layers of color with scratches made through the upper layer to reveal the color underneath. This is clearly leaning on its meaning of scratch and not equating the renaissance art to that on the sides of train cars. I myself lean toward the defacement camp, although I can appreciate a good piece of wall art when I see it. One who might have been more strongly in the art camp was the Nobel Prize winning French novelist Andre Gide who said
What cleanliness everywhere! You dare not throw your cigarette into the lake. No graffiti in the urinals. Switzerland is proud of this; but I believe this is just what she lacks: manure.

The podictionary word for today is bacon:  I had a moment of slight panic the other day.  I was listening to an NPR podcast and this guy was talking about bacon and how it came from porkbellies.  Now that in itself wouldn’t put most people into panic mode but you see I had just the day before sent the last and final corrections for my book back to the publisher.  No more changes to be made. 

And there in my book I mention in passing that the word bacon comes from the same Germanic source as the word back.  So shouldn’t bacon itself come from the back of the pig?  I rushed to the bookshelf and pulled out my Larousse Gastronomique.  To my horror there is said “lean cured sides of pork” and went on to say

“The word derives from the Old French bakko, meaning “ham.”  In French this became bacon meaning a piece of salt pork or even a whole pig.  It was then adopted by the English and returned to France with its present meaning.”

The  beads  of  sweat  began  to  form  on  my  forehead.  I know I make mistakes, but I hate knowing.  I clicked wikipedia. 

“Pork bellies are the underside of the hog, from which bacon is made   …   in the United States in other parts of the world, bacon is more often made from back and side meats”

I cracked open Mark Morton’s Cupboard Love and read The term back bacon is redundant in that bacon derives from the old German bach, meaning “back.”

So that’s where I learned it.  Could Mark be wrong?  No, Mark is right.  In fact everyone is right.  What is normally called bacon in North America is from pork bellies.  While in other places it is often loin.  The word did come into English from French, but it got into French from German.  I was surprised to see that the phrase saving one’s bacon goes as far back as 1654.  To save your bacon means to save yourself from getting into trouble and I can see most of the path in the development of the word bacon in English to guess at how we got this idiom. 

As Larousse said, bacon came from French and when it appears in English back in 1330 it meant salted meat from the back and sides of the pig.  But over time people started using bacon to mean not only those cuts of meat but the entire carcass, as well as unsalted, fresh meat.  To a very limited extent the word seems to have been applied to other flesh.  There is a citation for whale blubber called bacon, I suppose due to the fat association. 

The point is bacon had come to apply to an entire body, not just certain cuts.  In parallel a new sense of bacon appeared—and it appears in Shakespeare in Henry IV—with a meaning of a country bumpkin.  The idea here is that much of the population of rural England was sustained by eating pigs and just as French have been called frogs because they sometimes ate frogs’ legs, the hayseeds from the country were called bacon.   So here we have the word bacon applying on the one hand to the full bodies of animals and on the other hand referring to actual people. It’s only a short hop to think that to save my bacon would mean to “save myself.”

The podictionary word for today is hawk:  This one has been around for a while.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists its first citation for the word hawk as the year of our lord 700.  This is very solidly Old English since the Angles and Saxons had barely set foot in England for 200 years by that time.  Not surprisingly the word does not trace back to Latin or French, but to Germanic roots.  What I’m talking about here is the group of birds known as hawks and one of the reasons that a bird such as this would be written about so very long ago was that hawks were used in hunting. 

Hunting was important to the aristocracy of those ancient days, and when something is important, it has a better chance of getting written down.  It also has more likelihood to be developed into various refinements.  For example I’m sure when golf was invented the players didn’t have a whole bag full of different clubs.  But over time golfers evolved specialized tools in the various woods and irons to make the job of whacking the ball more effective. Hunting with hawks must have been the same.  One citation from much more recently explains their use this way. 

“The books of hawking assign to the different ranks of persons the sort of hawks proper to be used by them. The eagle, the vulture, and the merloun, for an emperor..The gos-hawk, for a yeoman..The sparrow-hawk for a priest.”

And just as golf clubs are designated as irons or woods the hunting birds had their own designations.  “Hawk of the Fist. One that flies direct off the fist without mounting or waiting-on.”

Hawk of the Soar. One that mounts in the air, and waits-on until the game be put up.
But none of this gives you an idea why a hawk is called a hawk in the first place.  The Germanic root of the word hawk has a meaning of “to seize” because these birds grab their prey in their talons as they fly.  I seized upon this word for today because yesterday I did the word havoc.  I said then that havoc seemed to have a Germanic origin although I wasn’t sure. 

I see now that I said that only because I was in a hurry.  The dictionaries are clear in pointing to a Germanic or Teutonic root.  What caught my eye, or my inner ear was the similarity in sound and meaning of both of these Germanic rooted words hawk “to seize” and havoc “to take” that is, “to take the plunder after a battle?” Now I stress that the dictionaries DO NOT link these two word roots, but it sure looks suspicious to me.  And in a similarly suspicious fashion I see that another meaning for the word hawk is to sell.  The dictionaries here tell me that this is a back formation from hawker.  A hawker being a peddler.  This hawker word only goes back 500 years in English but it too has a Germanic source and although it covers people who sell from stalls, it struck me that one of the old meanings was for people who carry their wares upon their back from place to place trying to sell them.  Could this kind of hawking be related to a word root meaning “to take?”  Just my humble suggestion. 

Before I let you go I thought I’d let you know that I also visited Urbandictionary.com for this one and found that there are a bunch of slang meanings to hawk including a knife and a mean spirited girl.  There was also hawk to “cough” or “spit,” but that is in the standard dictionaries too and obviously is an onomatopoeia.  But it made me smile to see that someone had submitted the OED definition of hawk as a bird and in their wisdom Urbandictionary users had voted down this meaning almost two to one.  I guess one doesn’t see too many avian hawks in an urban setting.