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'Cojones' is a vulgar Spanish word for testicles, corresponding to "balls" or "bollocks".

Contents

Usage in English

Notable recent usage

Use in Spanish and etymology

Books

External links

References

Usage in English

The word has entered popular use in the United States as a slang term meaning to have a brave attitude. It is used in a way similar to chutzpah or sisu. Anglicized/Americanized pronunciations include or the less accurate . A very frequent misspelling (sometimes done deliberately as a euphemism) is ''cajones'', which actually means "drawers" (the piece of furniture) or "wooden box drums" (see cajón) in Spanish.

Notable recent usage

The word was famously used in 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then serving as the USA's ambassador to the United Nations, in the aftermath of the downing of a Hermanos al Rescate light civilian aircraft by Cuban airforce MiG 29s on 24 February 1996. Following the release of a transcript of radio traffic between the fighter pilots in which one exclaimed, ''¡Le partimos los cojones!'' ("We busted his balls!"), Albright offered the following comment: "Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice." Albright later described the vulgarism as "the only Spanish word I know".^[1]
In April 2004 when Bob Woodward reported in his book ''Plan of Attack''—an account of the build-up to the 2003 Iraq War—that U.S. President George W. Bush had remarked to Alastair Campbell, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman, that "Your man has got cojones".^[2] Bush was referring to Blair's continuing support for the invasion of Iraq despite mounting opposition from his domestic political party and Britons at large. The meeting at Camp David in September 2002 at which Blair made his commitment on invasion to Bush, and Bush made his comment to Campbell, was later repeatedly referred to by Bush as "the cojones meeting". The word is also used frequently by TV pundit Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report.

Use in Spanish and etymology

'''Cojón''' (plural: '''cojones''') along with ''huevos'' (literally "eggs") is one of the most common ways of referring to the testicles in Spanish. It contains the augmentative suffix ''-ón'' (which implies largeness), and derives from Vulgar Latin ''coleonem'', the accusative form of ''coleo'' "testicle", an augmentative form of ''cōleus'' (variants: ''cūleus'' and ''culleus''), which meant "bag", particularly "leather bag for holding liquids".
The ''le'' → ''j'' or ''li'' → ''j'' pronunciation shift is a common one, as shown by other Latin and Spanish examples such as ''folia'' → ''hoja'', meaning "leaf", which is a cognate with the English word "foliage".
It can be used as in English to imply virility or courage: ''tener cojones'' = "to have balls".
The same word exists in Catalan as ''colló'', very commonly used in the plural (''collons'') as an exclamation. Other cognates include the French ''couilles'', Italian ''coglioni'', Portuguese ''colhões'', Romanian ''coaie''. Finnish language has multilateral expression sisu.
In Galician, the word for "cojones" is "collóns", seemed to catalan word.

Books

★ ''Collins Gem Latin Dictionary'', ISBN 0-00-458644-1

★ ''Diccionario Esencial Santillana de la Lengua Española'', ISBN 84-294-3415-1

External links

★ Rincón de Chistes - humorous page in Spanish describing various slang uses of the term (in Spanish)

★ Cojones Del Fuego - A London based rock band.

References

1. Transcript of a CNN interview with Albright that discusses the ''cojones'' quote
2. Reports on Bush's description of Blair