You hardly even notice it happening to you, if they’re good at it. They cozy up to you, almost like a brother, or at least a cousin, and they get you into what feels like a shared simpatico space – a kind of co-zen co-zone. But eventually, you realize you have been separated from your money or your moral principles, or at the very least a pretender has gained entry into your inner circle. You have been cozened.
It doesn’t sound very likely? Oh, my friend, it happens by the dozen. They catch you dozing, or simply with your guard down, and you’ll gladly supply in your own mind the story of why they belong where they are.
And this “they” includes words. Such as cozen. It’s a kind of Jay Gatsby of a word, except that by the end of The Great Gatsby we know where Gatsby really came from. We’re still not sure where cozen came from. There are a couple of good, interesting-looking, often-accepted possibilities – but they both present, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “difficulties, which the extant evidence is not sufficient to remove.”
One account has cozen coming from Italian cozzonare ‘cheat, play the knave’, from a term for a horse-breaker. The problem with this is that it’s not clear how it got from Italian to English, or why English spelled it with an s in the middle at first and only later gradually changed to z, and never used a double z. For an Italian relation, it sure seems English, or perhaps French.
The other account is a literal relationship to cousin: a cozener, or cousoner, as spelled in 1561, was reported to be someone who travels around and pretends to people to be a kinsman so as to be a parasite on them. You know, a knock on the door, and it’s some travelling person who introduces himself as your distant cousin Fred, who’s been travelling and is passing through town, and could you happen to spare a bed, et cetera. You take them in and are taken in by them. Of course, this kind of thing was much easier to pull off in 1561, not just because these days it’s easier to check (though scammers still do impersonate family members, usually by text message now) but because in our culture today we are more likely to direct some purported unkown relative to a hotel.
The problem with that etymological account, however, is that the historical spellings of this word have generally been with -on or -en, whereas cousin has long been spelled with -in. So, again, it looks good but not quite right and something doesn’t altogether add up and the connection can’t be attested all the way.
Cozen has to have come from somewhere, of course. But its disguise is good enough, and its origins murky enough, that we may never know for sure. And, frankly, we’re kept off balance from the very start by the relation between its spelling and pronunciation, which – while not without precedent – is nonstandard, and by the presence of that uncommon and eye-catching z. There’s something fascinating about it. How can you not see yourself taking it in… or vice versa?
Sesquiotica 