Hands down, the best word I learned in the past year was tracas.
Tracas (pronounced tra-cah or, sometimes, thra-cah) derives from the French tracasser, “to worry,” but the noun takes on a different cast in Cajun French. In the pockets of Acadiana where it’s used, tracas denotes agitation, fuss, trouble. And there’s also another element: “A tracas is something you’re obsessively annoyed by,” a friend who grew up deep in the bayou tells me. “It’s often related to food: the way people cook certain things.”
I did not need to be told this last part, because where I first encountered was in the context of what I call the Gumbo Wars. That is, debates about what gumbo is, how to make it, and, especially, what gumbo. There are, and pizza leads to no shortage of agita, nothing in this world creates more than the question of gumbo.
