Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Cangue
Cangue is a bit unfortunate. It's the name for a heavy piece of wood that Chinese criminals wore around the neck. I'm hoping it's an old fashioned term, for their sake. Your meanings for cangue were great. Thanks for your commitment. Best of all was the meaning suggested by Hey Jude. In fact, Jude, I think many of us will now have the word cangue forever in our vocabulary, thanks to your well written meaning. Great work!
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9 comments:
It's a dialect word for a mouth ulcer -- but only the sort that you keep biting down on by accident. Ouch.
Cangue is the name of a primitive adhesive made by the aborigines from kangaroo poo. They used it to repair boomerangs especially if they wouldn't come back. A shortage of kangaroo poo resulted in the phrase; sorry, no cangue!
Cangue is the sound a tree makes when during felling it strikes against a previously felled trunk.
Cangue is a barrier made of junk. Maybe it was a built barrier at first (a wire fence, or a stone wall between fields), but junk or weeds or vines or bamboo grow up on and near it, people throw loops of rusty wire on it, tumbleweeds come (not bamboo and tumbleweeds both in the same cangue, obviously), and generally it takes on a natural and impermeable shape.
Cangue is a made-up term used by some groups in some upper class college fraternities to describe themselves. They thought the word gang didn't quite capture their splendor, so they used cangue instead. They like to hang out places in their imported designer clothes, trying to look dangerous, and looking down their noses at all who walk by.
Stephen from Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
http://stephen-has-spoken.blogspot.com/
A cangue was a kind of strong, rubberised truss, invented during the Victorian era, when sadly there was such misinformed prudery when it came to perfectly normal stages of, shall we say, self development in a boy's life? The item was designed to be worn at night and could only be removed by a third party - usually the embarrassed adolescent's grim faced father.
Following on from the flower theme of ponceau; cangue is the official definition for the smelly water in a vase of flowers which should have been disposed of about 10 days ago. But because you didn't get around to it till now, you are left with a bunch of dead flowers with slimy stems and a vase full of cangue to deal with.
Funny that, Hey Jude. I wait so long for that surprise delivery of flowers, but the upkeep is beyond me and I, too, am left with the foul smelling cangue.
Cangue is the shortened version of the phrase, "CAt got your toNGUE?"
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