What a Hotsy-Totsy Tchotchke

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. How are you? Good morning.

Hello. How are you? Good morning yourself. Who is this?

My name is Adam. I’m calling from Chicago.

Hi, Adam from Chicago. Welcome to the show.

What’s on your mind today, Adam?

Well, I have this word that I had heard in my youth, and I hadn’t heard it very often through my teenage years and so on.

But the word is tchotchke.

The best definition of it that I can come up with is something like knickknack.

But it really can refer to any, you know, small individual items or trinkets or whatever.

And have you tried researching this?

I haven’t researched it too awful much, but I know that I’ve lived in various parts of the country.

And I’ve been naryfying anybody that actually has heard the word before.

I had always been told that it is basically Chicago slang, which would make sense because it sounds Polish and there’s a very sizable Polish population in Chicago.

And so that’s my assumption is that it must come from some Polish word.

Although the reason why it came up for me to have the impetus to call the show was that I was watching a cartoon called Archer where they used the word on that show.

And the creator of that show is from North Carolina.

And so now I have absolutely no idea what the genesis of this word is.

Oh, wow. Adam, so tchotchke. Boy, have we got news for you.

Okay.

Well, you’re definitely on to something with the Polish or just a Slavic origin of this term in general.

It’s a hard one to research if you don’t know how to spell it, though.

That’s why I was asking.

It’s a Yiddish word.

It can be spelled several different ways.

T-C-H-O-T-C-H-K-E.

Tchotchke.

Sometimes it spells C-H-O-T-C-H-K-I-E.

Or even T-S-A-T-S-K-E.

Tchotchke appears to have Slavic origins, and you’ll see similar sounding words in different languages, such as Polish, where it’s tzatzko, and Russian, where it’s tzatzka.

They all mean the same thing, a little trinket or plaything.

It’s also been used to apply to an adorable person, especially a small child, a little tchotchke.

That’s a lot wider of a birth than I thought at first that this would come from.

Yeah, if you’re around anybody with any kind of connection to Yiddish, you’ll probably hear this term.

But yeah, it’s the kind of stuff that you get, like you go to a conference and you get a swag bag and they have a thumb drive and a yellow highlighter and maybe a little flashlight on a keychain.

Or I also think of tchotchkes as, you know, those things when you go to visit your grandmother and she’s got those dusty shelves and their little figurines on there, little souvenirs that she picked up over the years or at a yard sale or something.

And maybe she really ought to get rid of.

But, yeah, those are tchotchkes.

Right, right.

Well, I work in retail and I work at a cheese counter in a grocery store.

And we do a lot of full wheels of cheese that we’ll cut down into pieces.

But every now and then you get these small little, you know, mini brie or something like that.

And I like to refer to those as tchotchkes.

That’s how I use it in my normal everyday language nowadays.

But, yeah, wow, that’s very interesting stuff.

Thank you so much for all of that.

Yeah, thank you for your call.

We appreciate it.

Take care.

Thank you for taking me.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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