Common Lexeme

cokko

Keywords: food, cuisine, society

Pronunciation (IPA): 't͡ʃok.ko 
Part of Speech: term noun verb 
Class: pali 
Forms: cokko, cokkos, cokkos olso, cokkos paj, cokkos kaca 
Glosses: chocolate, cocoa, luxury, luxurious 

Description:

The term 'cokko' refers to cholocate or cocoa. 'Chocolate' is a kind of luxury confection made from a kind of bean called a cocoa bean that grows in tropical areas. The beans are fermented and processed to create a product called cocoa, which is a mixture of fats and bitter solids. Chocolate is an edible confection made from cocoa. Frequently combined with additives like milk solids and sugar, chocolate has been revered as a culinary luxury good, often used in treats and desserts.

The plant is native to the Americas and the word as well as the practice of making and consuming chocolate comes from the indigenous Nahuatl people of Mexico. 

British people who consume older media have definitely seen it referenced in writing or seen it in pictures and video, but the common belief is that it is completely unavailable in Britain today. This is not quite true - it can be obtained from smugglers at astronomical prices. However, this once widely-available and wildly-popular confection is mostly a distant memory.

During the Global Collapse, the collapse of global supply chains and deglobalisation of food supplies and the devastating impacts of climate change on cocoa growers caused chocolate to go from a ubiquitous treat accessible to the vast majority of the world's population to virtually unobtainable outside of cocoa-growing areas.

The rise of the New World Order and the slow return of global trade in food brought a return of chocolate to temperate climate markets. Generally, raw cocoa is processed and packed for transport close to where it is grown, transported to where it will be consumed, and processed into a final consumer product close to where it will be consumed. In modern times, chocolate is readily available and avidly consumed by the elites, and prized and consumed as an occasional special treat by the professional class. It is available but often prohibitively expensive, and no longer necessarily all that appetising to the lower socioeconomic orders, except close to where it is grown. In much of the world, having access to and consuming chocolate is a potent status symbol.

This latter point has created a slang sense of 'cokko' as a word for luxury or poshness.

The word chocolate itself comes from the indigenous Mexican Nahuatl language and a version of this word has entered a plethora of languages globally, including English. Common obtained the term from these other languages, most likely with the greatest influence coming from English. It was orginally borrowed in a chaotic way, with a number of variant spellings, commonised to a number of greater or lesser extents, and versions of the word cocoa were attested as well.

By the late middle period, a short form 'cokko' was showing increasing dominance, and was being conflated with cocoa, while variants of cocoa were falling out of use entirely. The AXZ decision to codify the word for both chocolate and cocoa as 'na cokko' caused High Common to quickly settle on this terminology and the variants to fall out of use.

In the early modern period, the sense of 'cokko' and 'cokkos' as 'posh' or 'luxurious' was regional slang that arose independently in several areas. One of the places where this usage became popular was west-central Cascadia, and the popularity of Cascadian media is primarily responsible for the spread of this slang to become nearly universal in High Common over the modern period.

Noun:

In a noun context, 'na cokko' refers to either chocolate confections or to cocoa. The phrasal forms 'na cokkos kaca', 'na cokkos olso' and 'na cokkos paj' refer to 'cocoa beans', 'cocoa butter' and 'cocoa solids' respectively. In a slang sense, 'cokko' can mean luxury in general.

Verb:

Cokko is rarely used as  averb. In a verbal context, cokko is an intransitive pali verb meaning to be chocolate/chocolatey or to be luxurious or posh.

Modifier:

The modifier form 'cokkos' means 'chocolatey', 'composed of chocolate', 'luxurious' or 'posh'.

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