A Word That Sticks Out

Ccokoh, is arguably the natural state of the homo erectus trengganuiensis; but can he also be so in a moving state? Can a person be ccokoh when he is swinging (berayong)? Hanging by one hand to the branch of a tree (nnoneng or ggatong)? Or must he be sitting still, not doing much (dok ssaja) or minding his own business (dok wak dök)?

These are difficult questions given that nothing is completely static, that everything moves or hums or beats. So, presumably you could sit ccokoh on the edge of your verendah, with your legs swinging merrily to the sound of the trumpeting P. Jalil. Or be crouched over a newspaper, occasionally turning over the page.

I have always thought that what makes a person ccokoh is his conspicuous presence, sitting or standing proud, like a nail sticking out from the ledge. Haji Zainal Abidin Safarwan says in his monumental work, the Kamus Besar, that it is that and more. Cokoh can be lambing, tegak (erect) or tercokoh (i.e. the Trengganuspeak ccokoh) and that's melengung or, as Winstedt says in his Malay-English dictionary, ‘brooding’ (dok nnengung). Do you have to be brooding to be ccokoh? I thought not, but I must bow to their superior knowledge.

But even then I must disagree with my esteemed fellow Trengganuer Clark Gable of Pulau Duyong [see Comments, below]who seems to think that co’ko is synonymous with ccokoh (for which please see above), but must thank him for proposing that I be given the weight of the Awang Embong Dagang Award which is Trengganu’s answer, he says, to the Nobel Prize for Literature. I rather like the name, and will accept it — if offered — and will even pretend that I am deserving of the award. In true Trengganu spirit of göng and wak ek, no doubt.

My thanks to all of you who’ve put in comments here and elsewhere. I welcome and value every one of them; but please do not be disheartened if I take a long time to respond. I shall, in due course, give each one of them my attention.

10. How To...Co'ko

Sometimes in this hurly-burly whirdy-girdy business of life you have to call a stop, to put your life on hold so to speak. In life this may be hard as all those people who are wheezing past are probably not game for that. But in the more serious business of to [q.v.] or wök [q.v.] you can do just that by resorting to the co’ko that puts everything to a halt. It was from there that the idea of the ‘pause’ button on your video or DVD player originated.

Co’ko is probably one of those pure Trengganuspeak words because it incorporates a glottal stop. It may seem a spurious idea but in the mad rush of to or wök the pause is badly needed as a co’koer is often compelled to ask for pause in the middle of a hot pursuit, and the glottal stop gives him or her just enough time to catch a little breath. When a co’ko is thus declared, everything comes to a stop and everyone repairs to the shade.

There are people who draw comparisons between co’ko and the event that took place in the trenches in in WWI Europe, when the Germans and the Brits called for a Christmas eve break and were soon outside the trenches in a friendly football match. Co’ko isn’t at all like that, for the first rule of co’ko is that you don’t stop a game in point to start another sport. Co’ko is an oasis in the desert, the Milo van on a hot day during school break, for its main purpose is to replenish lost energy, not to re-divert.

It helps of course if the caller of co’ko is the biggest in the crowd, or if he or she is the owner of the kör [q.v.] in a game of wök. Here size and/or ownership is an advantage because the other rule of co’ko is that it really must stick. The other aspect of co’ko is that the co’koed party is often from the marginalised in a playgroup, whose inclusion in the playing crowd is only at the pleasure of those who call the shots.

Too many spurious co’kos make the person against whom it is called a veritable lepèk , i.e. one who is incapable of rising above the position of an underdog. In to or wök the underdog is the searcher/puruser in a chase that involves seeking players beneath houses, in disused wells, or in the rök. As if the co’ko isn’t enough, being lepèked is to be punished and humiliated, and the duration of the sentence is expressed in this rhyming couplet:

Pè’li watakollang,
Lepèk sekali, berbulang-bulang.

You can be co’koed more than once in a day, but you’ll be a lepèk for months after that.