sockerooni schloss

Has anyone come across the word sockerooni in the following context:
"They then sold that house, trousered another £100,000 or so, and used the extra to get themselves an even bigger mortgage and the truly sockerooni schloss they now occupy."

To give you the context, it comes from a Boris Johnson article
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/9593203/London-has-turned-its-back-on-the-very-people-it-needs-most.html

pretentious? something an Italian football celebrity might live in??

Something that knocks your socks off.

I agree with #1. According to the Urban Dictionary, socko means strikingly impressive, so I imagine that sockerooni is a sort of mock superlative of socko.

Oops! Duplicate post.

Edited by NorthAmerican.

Thanks #1 and #2,3 :)

It sounds like dated schoolboy slang to me. Something like "splendiferous".

There is a Newman's Own Sockarooni Pasta Sauce Described as:
>The sock-it-to-em pasta sauce that knocks your socks off. Peppers, spices, and the whole shebang! An intimate companion your pasta will never forget.
>Legend: sockarooni/sock it to 'em. Spaghetti sauce all alone by itself, just sitting out there naked will blow your socks off! Take yourself back to 1833 when Neapolitan adventures in St. Louis concocted this specific sauce, ingesting some, gathering strength, courage, endurance and wit to wrassle 1,000-pound bears. 150 Years later fortify myself with Sockarooni to wrassle my own private bear - which is just gittin through the day. P.S. non-vegetarians add meat as desired. - P. Loquesto Newman.

"Socko" sounds to me like something Variety, the show business newspaper, would have used in its heyday of slang use in headlines, say 1940-1960. (Stix Nix Hix Flix meaning "Movies about hillbillies are not doing well in rural areas," being the most famous example.)

The suffix -aroony was a favorite of Slim Gaillard in the jive language he called Vout, c. 1950. Laguna Oroonee.

Edited by: VinnyD to add link.

And I see that "socko" is Varietyspeak, according to Variety.

I don't think Variety invented it. The earliest citation I found was "1924 Dialect Notes V. 258 Sock-o (blow)." I found references ot 1920s baseball players nicknamed Socko, and "socko used to describe a hit ball or a hard football tackle.

From 1930 "Side-show showmanship has hit the boys socko, right "between the eyes, with the result that at times you can hardly hear the actors on the screen for the clatter of barkers, song-plugger.s and amusement machines in the lobbies."

I also found a 1929 magazine article "Socko, Whamo and Sonk! Effect of the Movies (and Talkies) on the English." The author says that "socko" is movie studio jargon for noise made by a punch to the jaw. ("Whamo" is the return punch. "Sonk," according ot a slang dictionary, is what we'd now call "zonked," as in "zonked out.")

I'll bet Variety picked it up from Hollywood.

So would I, and that general American English picked it up from Variety, and that Boris Johnson picked it up from American English.

I don't think Variety is claiming to have invented all the words in its list. Sticks, hicks, nix, and flicks al existed before Variety used them, for example.

From a 1916 Navy publication we have this:

"On the starboard side of the for'd turret a bunch of ship's comedians were playing 'socko,' double banking poor Swede Murphy, who was 'it,' with two socks, one of which contained a case-hardened Spalding sphere."

Thank you for that input:)

Oh well, so much for my suggestion that sockerooni schloss might refer to a fancy house lived in my an Italian soccer celebrity...

Well, shall we complicate things?

Sock
1. Comedy, the comic drama, comic acting--A term derived from the Latin soccus, a light, low, soft shoe worn in ancient Greek and Roman comic acting.
2. A tremendously successful show, performer, etc. Hence a sock hit.+ Also as +socko, sokko.

Theatre language: a dictionary of terms in English of the drama and stage from medieval to modern times. Theatre Arts Books, 1961 - 428 pages

The shoe existed, and is the origin of "sock," the thing that goes under shoes. Oxford:
>soccus, the low-heeled, loose-fitting shoe worn by Roman actors of comedy, of Greek origin. The word is often used to symbolize comedy; the poet Milton speaks of ‘Johnson's learned sock’.

I'm not buying it. I think the idea that some performance was so good that it socked you between the eyes, works better. "Sock" as a verb meaning "to hit" dates to at least 1700 and the origin is unknown, although there are speculations.

A "socking great" thing is an extremely large thing.

#13--

I'm sure you're right, nutrax.

Did you know that Mark Twain uses "sock it to him" in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court?

This is typical Boris Johnson hyperbole. Our London mayor is more popular than ever following the olympics, and is a great orator and comedian. There has been some debate about whether he's future Prime Minister material or whether he's not serious enough. Max Hastings recently commented "I would not trust him with my wife nor with my wallet."

BTW "socko" is Georgian for "mushromm"

Doesn't that Max Hastings quote imply that he wouldn't trust his wife with Johnson either? I don't think I'd be pleased if I were his wife.

Well, I know I'd be unhappy to be Max Hastings' wife, but you know what I mean.

I wouldn't think he necessarily implies lack of trust in his wife; men don't want their wives to be subject to advances period, whether or not the advances advance anywhere.

Which brings up this comment in a 1945 book on Australian slang: "Socker+ and +socking, as synonyms for an old English vulgarism widely current in this country, are recent inventions."

And let's not forget the running joke of "sock it to me" on the Laugh-In TV series. It developed into a long series of near-rhymes and puns and invariably ended up with someone getting a pie in the face or a dousing with water.

Random gleanings from 19th C and early 20th C. sources.

Sock was 19th C. Eton slang for "edibles of various kinds privately imported." Etonians also used it as a verb for "to eat," especially food eaten outside of regular meals.
>Hotten says the word is still used by the boys of Heriot's Hospital School at Edinburgh, and signifies a sweetmeat being derived from the same source as "sugar." "suck." Swedish sock "sugar."

A "sock shop" was a place that sold food.

At Winchester:
>to hit hard especially at cricket. It also means to beat or defeat in a game. "Sock" is a provincialism meaning to hit hard, but much used by slang-talking people

It is "old cant" for a pocket. "Not a rag in my sock" is BE for penniless.

"To sock" is an Americanism for "to smash a hat over head and ears." Also called "to bonnet."

There is a false etymology that sock,+ "to hit," came from +sockdaloger.+ (American history and/or trivia buffs will recognize "you sockdolagising old man-trap!") +Sockdologer is "1. a decisive blow or remark 2. an outstanding person or thing."

The etymology of sockdologer is unknown, but it dates only to the early 19th C.

Thanks again for all that input. I was using the article with a new student of mine. In the event, one of the few words he didn't have major problems understanding from that article was the word ...'schloss'...
And he told me he regularly peruses the The Telegraph :)

Max Hastings is simply referring to Boris's well-reported history of having affairs. If his way of saying it sounds a touch, or even more than a touch, politically incorrect, well that is consistent with Max Hastings having said it.

I think sometimes words get around precisely because they have more than one resonance.

Although I think it is irrelevant to the present question, (and apologies for wandering off in this way if it annoys you) but I'm interested to speculate whether Boris would use the word "soccer" for the game most - but certainly not all, or perhaps not all the time - British people call football (other than in specific contexts, for example he played at a Soccer Aid charity game).

Boris went to Eton, which has a curious relationship to the game. It is one of the few Public Schools to play (Association) football rather than rugby. But they also play a unique Eton variant of football known as the Field Game, and for that reason Association football at Eton is often referred to precisely as Association (full stop). Now soccer is precisely a coining derived from Association, like rugger from rugby, which is the kind of turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) upper class slang that falls comfortably from Boris Johnson's mouth. Unfortunately I no longer have the company (to my knowledge, anyway) of any tame ex-Etonians I could put such a question to. A relation of mine was a teacher there, indeed just at the time Boris was there, but he passed away some time ago, unfortunately very soon after retiring. Oh the things I would have asked him if he had stayed around long enough for his significant former charges to become apparent.

"Now soccer is precisely a coining derived from Association . . . "

Apparently because Association+ was commonly abbreviated +Assoc. and spoken as such.

I didn't bother to include it, but a number of those 19th C. books I looked at talked about "socker" as "Association football." For example:
>Socker (public schools), football played according to the Association Rules

ah, so I see we are slowly coming back to my original suggestion (OP) re Italian ((ooni...) socker (football) fan :)

Soccer used to be a very common word here (especially on TV) but seems to have gone out of favour.

Sacre Bleu!

We are, but that's not what it means sadly.