Student blog post: The history of ‘cotch’: from Victorians to Grime artists

Elizabeth Doherty is a first year student in English Language and Linguistics with an interest in language use in music and the media. Beth carried out her research using the Oxford English Dictionary (online) and the Early English Books Online Corpus.

The history of ‘cotch’: from Victorians to Grime artists

As a young person, it’s my experience that Grime music and associated youth culture has had significant impact on my language use and that of my social group. In my life, the rise of Grime appears to be linked with an increase in use of certain ‘slang’ terms. Linguistically, the Grime genre is full of language with interesting histories, and just one of these words is ‘cotch’. People my age have the metalinguistic belief that this is a new word with a recent etymology, but this isn’t true.


‘Cotch’ apparently derives from Jamaican English. It said that it is derived from the verb ‘scotch’ with deletion of the ‘s’, leaving ‘cotch’. In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, online), it says that ‘scotch’ is from Barbadian English, and means ‘to find or be given temporary make-do accommodation’. This can be seen to link to the noun sense of ‘cotch’. In the OED, ‘cotch’ is said to mean (in Jamaican English) ‘a place to sleep, rest or sit temporarily’.

According to the OED, the first instance of ‘cotch’ means something like ‘to rest oneself; to lean on something for support’, with usage in the late 1800s, e.g., ‘they are not supposed to cotch even for ten minutes…’. This shows that ‘cotch’ as lexeme was present in the Victorian era.

As part of my research into ‘cotch’, I looked into the Early English Books Online corpus where I found an instance of ‘cotch’ dating back to the 1600s:

(1) ‘Let the Cotch stay at Showlane end.’

It was not clear from the information in the corpus what this noun phrase meant – it could have been a misspelling of something else (a coach?). Still, it is possible that the word was in use quite early on. In any case, most of the usages I found related to some sense of relaxation, as in the Victorian instance above.

Today, ‘cotch’ has a very colloquial meaning. It is often described by young people as the act of ‘chilling out’. This definition of ‘cotch’, meaning to chill out or relax, is not surprising given the definition of ‘cotch’ during the Victorian era. The word appears to be popular with Grime artists, an underground genre of music often associated with youth culture.

Dizzee Rascal is a famous Grime artist. His debut album is called ‘Boy in Da Corner’. The first track of this record  features ‘cotch’ as a verb:

(2) ‘I’m just sitting here, I ain’t saying much, I just watch I really don’t feel like moving, so I cotch’.

We have seen above that ‘cotch’ can be both a verb and a noun, and so belongs to different parts of speech. On today’s Grime scene, I have noticed that the noun sense is often marked by a possessive. These instances appear to me to be linked with the competitive nature of Grime music, which is often a convention of the genre, e.g:

(3) ‘I’m back in the white man’s cotch’ (Graftin’, Dizzee Rascal).

Here, a ‘white man’s cotch’ can be interpreted as referring to a home or a place which one perhaps owns, almost as a metaphor for territory. It’s my perception that more artists and fans/young people are adopting ‘cotch’ in either part of speech to identify strongly with a particular subculture.

As you can see, ‘cotch’ has a very interesting history from Victorian society to its inclusion in Grime and youth culture. It seems to be that it’s meaning is reasonably fixed – I perceive ‘cotch’ to be common as a verb, but corpus work would be needed to confirm this. The core meaning is definitely to do with resting or chilling out. In any case, after such a long history, the lexeme really should take five minutes to cotch.


Beth Doherty – English Language and Linguistics Student, University of Sussex  

Comments

  1. I would draw your attention to the OED entry for "cwtsh" n., a Welsh word meaning a cubby-hole used as a hiding place, and the related "cwtsh" v., meaning to lie down or cuddle. Perhaps that is an alternative etymon for your "cotch". And both could be related to "couch" (noun and verb).

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  3. I would draw your attention to the OED entry for "scotch" n., a English term meaning to wedge something or someone somewhere. Why might you ask? Well I take your point of the term "cotch" meaning to find refuge, and propose that many eggs find refuge within the lovely sausage meat of a scotch egg. Perhaps these eggs are cotching? or are they scotching? I will leave this for you to ponder, as I do declare it to be one of the mysteries of man kind. Do eggs cotch? or scotch?

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  4. I would draw your attention to the OED entry for "egg" n., an English term meaning an oval or round object laid by a female bird, reptile, fish, or invertebrate, usually containing a developing embryo. As I ruminate about @IsaacCrawford97's comment about eggs cotching or scotching, I would like to weigh in my professional opinion on the matter. Though I concur with his deceleration of this being one of the mysteries of mankind, I believe that an egg finding asylum within the breaded confines of the delicacy known as the scotch egg is in fact scotching. Unfortunately, I do not have any evidence supporting my hypothesis thus far, but I shall be extending my resources globally to answer this age old question, or I will die trying.

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  5. Has anyone thought of the childrens' game hop-scotch? Moving precariously between temporary places of rest..?

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  6. My dad was frin the East End of London and he called the dog's bed the cotch!

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