Take my name Mookoo for example. When I browsed on the Internet in March, I found an interesting definition of the word MooKoo. See the first picture below, and you'll know that MooKoo can be used to "describe anything at any time anywhere." "This solemn word can mean anything depending on the sentence." The only sample sentence given is: This day was kind of . . . mookoo. Wow! What does it really mean?
My good friend Warren was also interested in knowing more about "Mookoo." He asked me by email: Can you tell me if your name has a special meaning?
Here is my answer:
"Mookoo" is the way my father calls me in the Hakka dialect. It actually sounds like [muk-ku] in IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The first syllable, [muk], is the Hakka sound of the Chinese character 木, which means either tree or wood, one of the five important elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) generally called Wu Xing in Chinese. And the second syllable of my Hakka name, [ku], is a popular "ending" (just like "suffix" in English) which is added to a child's name to mean that the child is male, not female. This is a tradition in the Hakka dialect that I've found in my hometown. For a female kid, they don't use [-ku].
In Hakka, they call an ox "ngiu-ku" and a (female) cow "ngiu-ma." Similarly, a hen is called "ke-ma" but a male chicken can be "ke-ku." So, as you may have guessed, you can call a boy XX-ku or YY-ku, but you should not add the suffix "-ku" to an adult man's name, nor to anyone whom you don't know so well --Anyway, doing that is an intimate way to call a boy or a (young) man in Hakka!
Now you know why I love this pen name of mine -- Mookoo, don't you? (I spell it this way to make it a bit more interesting to myself.)
