• pocketbook •
Pronunciation: pah-kit-bUk • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. Purse, lady's (hand)bag. 2. A small book that may be carried in a pocket. 3. A pocket-sized case for carrying papers or money. 4. Financial resources, available or accessible money.
Notes: My impression is that pocketbook is preferred by Southern Belles, while purse seems preferable to women in the rest of the United States. Like most compound nouns it is a lexical orphan.
In Play: We have a plethora of jokes about the contents of pocketbooks: "Aly Katz is a pistol packing mama who carries her weapon in her pocketbook." They often contain important stuff: "She was told to respect everyone at the party but to keep her pocketbook on her shoulder." The fourth definition above is the latest: "Electric vehicles appeal more to my love of the environment than to my pocketbook."
Word History: Today's Good Word is obviously a compound of pocket + book whose meaning has drifted far away from its original sense (No. 2 above). Pocket was taken from Anglo-Norman poquet, the diminutive of poque, poke "bag, sack". Poke in the sense of "sack" survives today only in the idiom 'pig in a poke'. In Old North French poque became pouche, which English swiped for its pouch. Originally, a pocket was a bag sewn to clothing or belts; only later did we start building them into clothing. Book is related to beech, the tree whose bark was the original PIE paper; in fact, the German words for "book" and "beech" are today Buch and Buche, respectively. In Russian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian bukva means "letter", but in Serbian it means "beech".
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