2011 Not Whole

     Occasionally I'll run across a word that's in common parlance and see it for the first time from a different perspective.
     Take the word "knothole." It's something on a tree or on a piece of wood. It appears to be from where a branch was but is no longer. But there's nothing knotty about it. As in a tangle of some sort. That's how it's spelled.
     But since English is such a flexible language in the way it sounds, "knot" the tangle also sounds like "not" the lack of anything. It's not a knot, it's a bump. Or a hole. So if it's not hole, what is it?
     Especially since knotholes in paneling aren't always holes. So they are not holes. They are filled-in places. But if it's a not hole how can you fill it in.
     Maybe they mean it's just not whole. As in partial or incomplete. The piece of wood is not whole where you can see the break in the grain where a branch used to be.
     This tangled knot of reasoning is not reasonable at all.
     The other weird word I rethought is Parcheesi. Parcheesi was a game I never played in my youth. But I saw it all the time because it was on the back of my Chinese Checkers board.
     Parcheesi originally came from India, so the Chinese Checkers/Parcheesi board was one of the first Asian encroachments into the American home. That and ketchup.
     Of course today, the word cheesy implies something less than elegant. Leading one to think that par-cheesy has something to do with a shoddy game of golf. Maybe a temporary course. One where they use non-wood and rusty iron clubs and don't actually fully dig out the cups.
     So they're just indentations --- not holes.
     America, ya gotta love it.