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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Mansons2005, post: 202374, member: 121&quot;]Having NOTHING else to do with my life, I thought I would look for the origins and support for my memory of calling these cockamamies....................and lo and behold, I FOUND it:</p><p><br /></p><p><font size="6"><b>Cockamamie</b></font></p><p>Pronounced /ˈkɒkəˌmeɪmɪ/<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.worldwidewords.org/img/common/pronquery.gif" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Cockamamie</i> — something ridiculous, incredible or implausible — is an intrinsically funny word, but it’s truly incredible that word historians believe it’s a close relative of <i>decal</i>, a design prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be the case.)</p><p><br /></p><p>The original of both <i>cockamamie</i> and <i>decal</i> is the French <i>décalcomanie</i>, which was created in the early 1860s to refer to the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines <i>décalquer</i>, to transport a tracing, with <i>manie</i>, a mania or craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain — it’s recorded in the magazine <i>The Queen</i> on 27 February 1864: “There are few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as decalcomanie”. It reached the United States around 1869 and — to judge from the number of newspaper references in that year — became as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word was quickly Anglicised as <i>decalcomania</i> and in the 1950s it became abbreviated to <i>decal</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p>The link between <i>decalcomania</i> and <i>cockamamie</i> isn’t proved, but the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the other. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period, using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum. Shelly Winters wrote of <i>cockamamie</i> in <i>The New York Times</i> in 1956 that “This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie a decalcomania is stared at.”</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-coc1.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-coc1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-coc1.htm</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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