Saturday, May 31, 2008

It's all good


Cooter is a small town in southeastern Missouri.
It sits between I-55 and the Mississippi River and has a population of about 440. There are a couple of explanations for the town's name. One holds that the town was named for an abundance of ducklike aquatic birds called coots. The other contends it was named for the Coutres, a prominent local family.
But if you look the word up in a dictionary of slang, you'll find it is also another name for vagina. (It's also a slang term in the Southeastern U.S. for the snapping turtle.)
So you can imagine our consternation when we turned to the sports page in today's newspaper and saw the headline:

Seams
Handles
Cooter


The story was about Seams Sports Academy winning the Fat City Classic American Legion Baseball tournament by beating the team from Cooter, Mo.
While the team in question was sponsored by the local American Legion post and not affiliated with the high school, it is interesting to note that the Cooter High School nickname is the Wildcats. It begs the question whether the "cat" reference was meant as a subtle double-entendre or purely accidental.
Cooter, as you may have noticed from the map, is close to Gobler and Braggadocio.
I could never make this stuff up.

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