Beware of the Chuch!
By: Marne Platt
Tags: This Happened To Me, Words, Best Friends Forever, Neologisms, Humor

Beware of the Chuch!

Image by Tumisu on Pixabay

Eewwww, what on earth is THAT?

I don’t know. I think it used to be lunch. Maybe in February? I don’t want to look too closely.

It was June, and my best friend and I were cleaning out our school lockers. We had survived 9th grade, our first year in high school.

It hadn’t been easy. Shifting social cliques, new alliances, new teachers to manage. Through it all, Michael and I remained the best of friends. We could laugh, commiserate, and help each other with homework.

Now summer’s freedom beckoned. But first, we had to clean up.

Some of it was easy: class notes, notes from friends, empty pens and broken pencils all went right into the hallway garbage. Favourite pictures would come home, to be saved for next year. And stinky leftover lunches were carried in outstretched hands to the outside garbage, dumped, followed by a stop in our respective bathrooms to clean the stench off our hands.

When the bits and pieces had all been dealt with, it remained. Grey-black. Sticky. A little fuzzy in spots. Not quite stinky but not exactly fresh-smelling either. A layer of dirt and dust with bits of mud, spilled drinks, ink, crumbs, and who knows what else, congealed into a semi-solid mass lining the bottom of our otherwise relatively decent-looking lockers.

It had no name, so we gave it one. We called it ‘chuch.’

It had no name. We called it Chuch

Chuch, to our knowledge, had never been used to describe anything before. We knew that it would fit right in with our grandparents’ Yiddish-isms.

Not only did it have that great ‘ccchhhh’ sound, the rolling, guttural one that sounded like a cross between clearing your throat and swallowing a sneeze, it had it on both ends. And the ‘uh’ in the middle was like ‘uuuh.’ As in your first reaction when you looked down and saw it.

Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash

A new word was born. And what a word! Chuch is perfect for many of life’s yuckier substances: the stickiness on your keyboard after years of typing. The grey smelly build-up in your washing machine’s drum that lends its odour, if not its colour, to your favourite clothes. And the lush and natural but still vaguely disgusting layer at the bottom of your compost bin.

Chuch is stickier than schmutz, though not as sticky as muck. Fuzzier than gunk, without filth’s stench. And certainly more interesting than mere grime. It is everywhere you least want to look.

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

The most perfect chuch I have ever seen was the chuch on the floor of Dunbars, the dive bar I drank in during college. A mix of Ithaca mud, spilled beer, pizza crumbs and popcorn oil, it could be mopped over but never mopped up. Dunbars is closed now, but I bet the chuch is still on the floor of whatever business took over the space.

It’s been decades since that day in high school. Michael and I live far apart, and lead very different lives. But I am still 100% confident in two things: his friendship, and his use of chuch when he cleans out the fridge.

As for our lockers, we never did get them clean. Chuch is tough.

Inspired by Tree Langdon’s dictionary of neologisms.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, try some more of my writing. You’ll have far more fun than you will cleaning up your chuch.