[A. G. Maisey]

Gee whiz Pangeran, I wish I was as clever as you are!

I use a dictionary all the time. I am a native English speaker, virtually all my work involves writing, and I find that I constantly need to refer to one dictionary or another, and then there's my thesaurus. I can't even survive without a dictionary in the language I've been using for the last 60 odd years.

Now, when I move into Indonesian and Javanese---goodness me! I've got so many dictionaries I just don't know where to start.I've never actually studied Indonesian, I've just learnt to use it. Pretty much the same as I learnt to use English.

Yeah, I can carry on a conversation in Indonesian, and I must admit that my Indonesian is pretty much as she is spoke by ordinary people in Solo. No problem with that. I can rip off a letter that will be easily understood. I use a mixture of Indonesian, Javanese and English every single day in conversation within my own family.
But when it comes to writing a formal letter to a government official, I check every second word with a dictionary.

Now lets just have a look at this word "ngoceh".

In Javanese it can actually come from two different words:- koceh, which means to splash about in water, or to splash money around, and can be extended into other meanings as well such as to smear. Colloquially it can be used to refer to babbling speech , where the speech is likened to somebody splashing words around without meaning, as one would splash water.

However, if "ngoceh" is considered to come from "oceh", it has a somewhat different meaning.Applied to birds it means to twitter or chirp, but applied to a person it means to talk too much.

Slight differences, but significant differences:- applied to a person, it can mean to talk nonsense, or it can mean to talk too much, and of course, the meaning depends on the specific context.

However,applied to a bird, it means to twitter, chirp, possibly even to warble , and a bird that talks can be referred to as an "oceh-ocehan".

Of course, in Indonesian, the words "oceh", and "koceh" have virtually the same meaning, the subtle differences that apply when the words are used in Javanese have disappeared when those words have come into Indonesian.In Indonesian, the idea of "empty chatter" applies to both words. One would not use "ngoceh" to refer to a Saturday afternoon yarn with a mate---not unless one wished to denigrate the content of the conversation.

When we look at keris terminology in Jawa, we need to look at the terms and words used from the Javanese perspective, not from the Indonesian language perspective. Thus, "Jalak Ngoceh" must be read as Javanese, not Indonesian.

In Javanese this term "Jalak Ngoceh" can only be understood as "chirping/twittering/warbling jalak". Or even "chattering", but the English word "chattering" is a word better applied to a human context, rather than a bird context, especially when we have words such as "chirping", and "twittering" available.

Regarding dapur names, I guess you need a rather poetic nature, and an other wordly imagination to relate many dapur names to the physical objects to which they refer. The actual features of any dapur can be interpreted differently according to the pakem that is being followed. Personally, I try to avoid as much as possible the use of dapur names, and prefer to describe a blade in terms of the features present.