Maybe I better explain this. . .

So when I was younger (as in, like, four years old) my brother (he would have been two) and I would bathe together. Afterwords (as she was handing us the towels) we would give our poor mother the slip and run down the hall to our bedrooms. We would then proceed to jump up and down on the beds, naked as the day we were born and laughing like hyenas all the way. On the days in which she chose to play along, our mother would follow us down the hall exclaiming "Nackebuhs! Nackebuhs! Sie sind nackebuhs!" My mother is German.

For years (28 of them, to be exact), I always assumed that "nackebuhs" meant "crazed naked children running amuck" in German. I mean, doesn't it sound like it should? So of course I had no choice but to name this blog Nackebuhs (What's Eating Ugly Kid Joey was already taken).

The correct spelling was paramount. I tried googling "nacaboos," "nacabus," "nakaboos," and about 5 more permutations (with no luck) when I attempted to approach the problem from the other direction. I went to an online English/German dictionary and started typing in "babies in the buff," "children running stark raving naked mad in the streets," ect, ect. I knew it wasn't simply "buck-naked," it had something to do with being a loony kid as well. It was a term of endearment.

Well I finally did the sensible thing and wrote my mother:

Hello Mutti! Wie gehts? Say I have a quick question for you, how do you spell "nacaboos" (the German word for "naked" that we used when we were children)?

(I didn't want to remind her of its berserking context.)

Well imagine my surprise when she wrote back:

It's "nackebuhs" - I think. It's not a real word, so to speak.

Alles Liebe, Mutti

This floored me. I mean, I had been telling this story for years and years, always under the assumption that nackebuhs was a real German word! It was actually one of my favorite German words, alongside cocosnuss (coconut) and fressen (to guzzle or to gorge). I guess I could go into a conversation now about the past and what is real and what is imagined but I really don't feel like it. This humble post is just about explaining the title of this blog. If you want to know how to correctly pronounce it you'll have to call me. Or my mother.