Use your cokum

[davetherayon]

This came up in conversation today, someone uttered it in a meeting and there were blank faces among a lot of people... I knew what he meant, 'common cokum' when I were a lad was like 'common sense', 'use your noodle', and so on. So to educate the young'ns who'd never heard this phrase I googled it ... zero responses! Cokum, cocum, coakam, all returned nothing relevant. Surely not a word with no internet knowledge? There's kokum, which is a tree, but 'use your tropical evergreen tree from India, Garcinia indica, that produces fruit which is dark purple when ripe containing large seeds from which an important edible fat is obtained' doesn't quite fit the desired meaning.

Is this one of those olde English words that's fallen by the wayside? Anyone know the etymology of it?

[Get Off My Cloud]

Sounds like a regional thing to me rather than an old thing.

[Postmodern Smoking]

Never heard of it before either

[gill2009]

  I've never heard of it either davetherayon 

[crump]

Cokum (n & adj): Opportunity, advantage, shrewd, cunning.

www.tlucretius.net/Sophie/Castle/victorian_slang.html

[minime]

Iv heard it said a fare bit but then I'm not far from Nottingham.

[Get Off My Cloud]

Various word forms and senses were recorded which, though not necessarily even of likely Scandinavian origin, are yet characteristic of the Danelaw rather than Saxon areas of England. Among these were again in the sense of 'later’, aisy (easy), bap (kind of loaf), better (‘recovered’), bowly (child’s ‘bogey’ ie nit or nasal mucous particle), clatch (clout; doughy), clotch (clot), cokum (cunning; stupid), daft,

www.yek.me.uk/gmsynlex.html

So looks like a possible Scandinavian origin.

[davetherayon]

"Bap" is one we use a lot round here, that's an interesting one as the regional variation is very wide when you travel not far at all. The often encountered "roll" is identical, as is the Coventrarian "batch", and to the Yorkshire guys I used to work with it was a "sandwich".