Fuzzy-Wuzzy

A funny post from the NY Times Paper Cuts blog about playing Dictionary with Ammon Shea, author of Reading the O.E.D.: One Man, One Year:

Shea went first. Opening one of the dictionary’s three volumes, the man who read the O.E.D. lowered his finger and called out: “Fuzzy-wuzzy! F-U-Z-Z-Y, hyphen, W-U-Z-Z-Y.” The rest of us looked at each other for a moment — was he kidding? — and then started scribbling like mad. We passed our Post-it notes across the table, and Shea read a list of possible definitions: a plant? a caterpillar? a hairless bear, based on the children’s rhyme? an “insistent yet friendly” thigh cramp? None of us guessed the actual meaning, and for good reason: “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” was the colonial British name for a tribe from Port Sudan. Two points to Shea, for picking a word nobody could figure out. “You should have known that was the real definition,” he said, “because who of us sitting here would write that as our fake one?”