copra

[prettygoodword]

copra (KOP-ruh, KOH-pruh) - n., the dried white flesh of the coconut, from which coconut oil is expressed.


And not, as I somehow had the impression, the dried fibrous husk of a coconut -- no idea where I got that. We got the word in the 1580s from Portuguese, which got it from a Tamil language, most likely Malayalam koppara but possibly Tamil kopparai, which is cognate with Sanskrit kūrpasa, coconut (and its modern descendants such as Hindi khopā), but whether it went Dravidian > Sanskrit or Sanskrit > Dravidian, I can't tell from a brief search.


And that's all the words encountered in Chalet School books I currently have on hand -- back next week with words just as random but more randomly sourced.

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

And not, as I somehow had the impression, the dried fibrous husk of a coconut -- no idea where I got that.

Could you have been thinking of this similar (but apparently etymologically unrelated) word?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coir

[prettygoodword]

That looks really likely. Interesting that it's also of Tamil/Malayalam origin.

[full_metal_ox]

My first encounter with the word “copra” was in the darndest context: as part of an inventory of adventuring supplies in Bored of the Rings (1969), by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney of future National Lampoon fame:

The gifts were quickly stowed away in the little boats along with certain other impedimenta needful for a quest, including ropes; tins of Dinty Moore beef stew; a lot of copra; magic cloaks that blended in with any background, either green grass, green trees, green rocks, or green sky; a copy of Jane's Dragons and Basilisks of the World; a box of dog yummies, and a case of Poland water.

(Less than a decade later, a certain amount of the period-colored humor was already Before My Time; the incantation “Clean for Gene!” is a non-sequitur unless you paid attention to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign.)

[prettygoodword]

I remember Jane's Dragons and Basilisks of the World but nothing else from that list. Tbf I was probably 13 when I read that.