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It literally means “fire-pooper” in Spanish.

Cacafuegoīorrowed into English in the 1600s, a cacafuego or cacafugo is a blustering, swaggering boaster. Should you ever need to, you can also use cabby-labby as a verb, meaning “to argue” or “to disagree.” 2. Cabby-LabbyĪlso called a cabby-lab, cabby-labby is an old Scots dialect word for a noisy quarrel or disagreement in which everyone involved is speaking at the same time. This all means that C isn’t used as much today as it was in Old English, but you can still expect it to account for around 2.5 percent of a page of written English, and it accounts for 3.5 percent of all the words in a dictionary-including the 40 clever C-words collected and collated here. Ultimately, C typically came to be used in all the “s”-sounding words (known as “soft-C”), while the Greek K was rescued from the linguistic scrapheap and began to be used for the “hard-C” words.

Old English speakers were now facing the same problem that the Romans had had, as their letter C was being used for two entirely different sounds. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the English language adopted a number of words from French in which the Latin letter C was now being used to represent a “s” sound, like city, citizen, and circle. Just as things were starting to settle down, along came William the Conqueror.

So when the Roman alphabet was introduced to England, C was originally used for all instances of the “k” sound-as in cyng (Old English “king”), sticca (“stick”), lician (“like”), cneow (“knee”), and cniht (“knight”). Having one letter to represent multiple sounds proved confusing, and so Roman scribes invented a new letter, G, to represent “g,” which freed C to represent the “k” sound. The letter C is a modern-day descendent of the Ancient Greek letter gamma, and as such originally represented a “g” sound rather than “k.” The Romans, however, confused everything they typically used their letter C to represent both “g” and “k” sounds, avoiding the letter K (which was descended from the Greek kappa) almost entirely.