When I was a little girl Mom used to tell me to wash my cuckeloos, which were my ears, and I used to use that word till I was around eleven years old. All the people in our family use it and I’ve heard a couple of our neighbours use it. But it is not known to everyone at home because when I used it one day, without thinking, [and] the other person just stared at me and asked me what that was. She’d never heard it before. It may be a term used by parents to their children, with a gesture of some sort to get them to wash their ears. If they use a word like cuckeloo the child will take it as some sort of game, with the mother playing with him.
Informant: Mae Drodge, age 44 – lives in Little Heart’s Ease, but is from Burin originally.
Source: Rosalind Drodge – collected for a Folklore Course at MUN in 1971.