Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (Aug. 6, 2011)

Polish Proverb
The greatest love is a mother’s, then a dog’s, then a sweetheart’s.

Basic Smarts
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Credo
Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.
…Charles Fort

Male Chauvinism

The Chichevache is a mythological European monster fabled to feed on good women. Bi-corn, in early French and English literature, is a mythical animal, usually depicted as a grotesquely fat beast that existed solely by devouring virtuous husbands.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Chichivache (human-faced cow) is perpetually starved to skin and bone because of the scarcity of obedient and faithful wives. The Bicorne or Bycorne, a counterpart to the Chichevache which fed on obedient and kind husbands, was reputedly fat and plump because of the plentiful supply of such men.

Precautionary Measure

Edo: That was a nice crowd you had over for weekend guests.

Bedo: Yes, but as you know, I make it a point to tell them beforehand that if when Sunday rolls around and we start drinking, and we insist they stay until Tuesday, that we don’t mean it.

What’s in a Name?

Dadekian/Dadekhian: Hebrew and Persian in derivation, Dadekh is a variant of Dadegh, in turn a variant of Dadagh, which is a conflation of Dada and agha, Dada being the diminutive of David, a proper noun, and agha an honorific term of respect, which in Turkish may pass for lord, master, gentleman, and in the original Persian for sir.

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CK Garabed

Weekly Columnist

C.K. Garabed (a.k.a. Charles Kasbarian) has been active in the Armenian Church and Armenian community organizations all his life. As a writer and editor, he has been a keen observer of, and outspoken commentator on, political and social matters affecting Armenian Americans. He has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Reporter and the AGBU Literary Quarterly, “ARARAT.” For the last 30 years, Garabed has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Weekly. He produces a weekly column called “Uncle Garabed's Notebook,” in which he presents an assortment of tales, anecdotes, poems, riddles, and trivia; for the past 10 years, each column has contained a deconstruction of an Armenian surname. He believes his greatest accomplishment in life, and his contribution to the Armenian nation, has been the espousing of Aghavni, and the begetting of Antranig and Lucine.

Latest posts by CK Garabed (see all)

• A Reminiscence: John Najarian - February 19, 2020
• Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (Aug. 5, 2017) - August 7, 2017
• Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (July 22, 2017) - July 22, 2017