A Real Corker Ends the Party and Names a Mischievous Child

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jackie Sobrey from Hinsdale, Illinois.

And the word is corker.

My mom used to use it when one of the kids did something a little mischievous or not naughty. Maybe a little naughty, but not bad. And I used it on my children and my husband. And then my husband looked it up and he said, how could your mother use this word? It doesn’t mean anything other than a person who puts corks in bottles for a living.

Really? Well, I’ve looked it up since into other dictionaries, and that’s not what it says. So we wondered about it.

Yeah. So what kind of behavior are we talking about here that would make somebody be called a corker?

Well, if you were to take one of your other siblings’ Easter eggs out of their Easter basket and replace the money that might have been in it with a piece of chocolate, and they found out they were the only child who didn’t get that kind of thing in one of their eggs. So just little things, and whoever was giggling or just little kind of being rambunctious or mischievous. So they’d be a corker.

Yeah, I know that one. He must have had a pretty bad dictionary not to find the sense of corker that we’re talking about here, the sense of something that is extraordinary or unusual or just kind of takes the cake.

Yes, takes the cake. Or the money you get out of the Easter egg. Or takes the money.

That too, yeah. Yeah, its origin does have to do with corks in bottles, but it’s not about the person who puts them in the bottles.

Kind of isn’t. It’s about the end of things. It’s about the thing that ends the party. It puts the cork back in the wine bottle or back in the beer barrel because it’s the end of things. There’s no point in talking any further because the thing that we’re talking about is obviously, and inarguably, the best that there ever was. There’s no point in saying anything more about it. So that’s the end of the discussion.

And so we’re going to put the cork back in the bottle and this party is over. And so it is the corker. And it goes back as far as the 1830s. And, of course, there’s some overlap with the expression to put a cork in it, which means it’s a rude way of saying to stop talking. Again, having to do with putting a cork in a hole, you know, to stop whatever’s coming out of it.

And by the 1870s, it really was mostly about something remarkable. So a woman could be a corker if she was beautiful, or a man could be a corker if he was handsome or very athletic or something. Because you are ending all talk about who is the best or who is the most. It’s also used to mean a knockout punch. That was a real corker.

And there’s also some overlap with baseball because you might have a corker as a hit, a really strong hit out into the field. And the idea here was that maybe the bat and the ball had cork in the center, which would make that ball behave differently, go further. So obviously a cork-filled bat was not something that would be allowed. So that would be a corker as well.

And all of these meanings of corker kind of interplay with each other, all kind of occupy that same slang register of English.

Okay.

Okay. Well, that makes sense. How interesting. So how many little corkers do you have?

Well, my mother had six.

Wow. Okay.

Yes. And then there were grandchildren that were known to be corkers as well.

Oh, okay. Got it. Well, thank you. This adds some insight to it, yes. I appreciate it.

Jackie, thank you so much for your call. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, too.

All right, bye-bye.

Thanks, Jackie.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.