Thanks to an intrepid commenter we now have the best definition yet of defendant Joe Price’s e-mail name — Culuket. Joe Price used the culuket e-mail address for both non-sexual communication, as well as sexually-oriented communication. This information was revealed in the affidavit for search warrants.
The anonymous commenter says,
“Regarding Price’s “culuket” email name and its meaning… the Urban Dictionary defines culu as an “anal passage” … “ket” is defined as ketamine. Ketamine is a drug used in the gay and rave circuits. I posed one question before that I believe ketamine was used on Robert Wone the night he was murdered. Now I’m convinced.”Michael, one of our other bloggers was onto to “culu,” which in Spanish means “ass.” So clearly the Urban Dictionary definition of “culu” uses a Spanish etymology. But we missed the “ket” reference as I have always heard of the slang term for ketamine as “K” or “Special K.”
Of course if a better definition comes along, we will post it, but for now I think this one pretty much nails it.
– Posted by David
I’m happy this tidbit of information has been posted prominently on your website and I hope some saavy investigator is monitoring your blog. This information could be vital to uncovering the truth surrounding this horrid death.
Acc. to the warrants & new reports, the investigators already seized and searched Price's computers and subpoenaed Yahoo to get info from his culuket account. We already know that Price is fascinated by anal stuff and is into drugs.
But what drugs is important to the case. If the authorities test tissue samples for ketamine, well…..they may be in a world of hurt…..and not the kine of hurt Joe Price likes.
My late sister-in-law died from an overdose caused by injecting K, which she obtained through her job as a veterinary assistant. She was dead before she hit the floor, if the coroner is to be believed.
My apologies for posting a comment so belatedly here, but having discussed this in the comments on a much later post, I want to put this comment where it belongs, so that people reading the archives will see it.
The theory proposed here is, in a word, bullculu. First, one shouldn’t forget the fact that it’s built entirely on speculation.
And second, it relies on an entry in Urban Dictionary, a source just slightly more reliable than the old Isuzu “pathological liar” spokesman. (Note definition #6 for Michael: would we really want to speculate that someone with the username Michael is mentally ill, based on Urban Dictionary?)
Should we believe UD (about “culu”, not “Michael”)? Googling “culu” turns up that definition; this site; and then thousands of unrelated hits. It’s the Centre Universite de Luxembourg, it’s a polo-themed resort, it’s an Irish castle, it’s something a Digimon character says…. A Google search for culu sex turns up positively nothing prurient (Culu Culu ads promising no discrimination, and so on); even a Google image search with “Safe Search” turned off turns up nothing remotely pornographic on the first page. (It’s true that Latin “culus” and thence French “cul” means “backside”—from which we get “culottes” and “cul-de-sac”—but then again, the screen name isn’t “Culusket” or “Culket”.)
Basically, I don’t see anything whatsoever to suggest that “culu-” really does mean “anal” anywhere outside a single poster’s opinion on Urban Dictionary. I’d urge people to keep that in mind when writing about the username.
Lance,
If we look to other languages, culu in spanish means ass, and in Greek colu means ass — so there are definitions beyond the urban dicitionary.
We have also found Culu is a character(s) in the Star Wars franchise, but without any information that Joe Price was into Star Wars, we don’t know if that is where the name derives from.
The culuket defintion which we posted could also have been a riff, as one commenter put it on the state the ketamine the drug creates called a “K-hole.”
David
I have to say, first of all, that I don’t really believe that “culu” is Spanish for “ass”, at least not in any wide-spread and well-known usage. “Culo”, yes; when I image-search culo, I get no shortage of not-safe-for-work images; but I get nothing for “culu” but polo horses and such. Even when I image-search on google.es. Given how hard it typically is to not get porn on an image search, that makes me really, really skeptical that “culu” (and not “culo”) is really the word for “ass”.
But even if it were–why reject the Star Wars connection and not the Spanish connection? Do we know that Price speaks Spanish? Not just high-school or even college Spanish, where “ass” isn’t likely to come up, but actually speaks it? If not, it seems really clear that you’re picking a theory that proves what you want it to, and not because there’s any actual evidence for it.
Lance, I am bilingual in English and Spanish and have lived in Latin America. Culo- or Culu means ass and has a specific sexual connotation. It is vernacular and not considered polite in conversation.
I hate asking this, but: can you provide any evidence on the web that “culu” means “ass” in Spanish? Again, I have no doubt at all about “culo”; less than a minute of image searching and websearching is enough to convince me. But the contrast between the thousands of images and webpages using “culo” to mean “ass”, versus the practically zero pages using “culu”, really makes me wonder.
(This wiktionary page does list “culu” as Sicilian for “ass”. But not Spanish. And “Price” doesn’t strike me as a particularly Sicilian name….)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20080621211627AAKKHDK
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/translation/Asturian/culu
Let’s see…the first link in fact explicitly states that “culu” is not Spanish. And if the second link is reliable, “culu” definitely means “ass” in Asturian, Calabrese, Leonese, Sardinian, and Sicilian. That is to say: in certain dialects spoken in the very south of Italy, as well as a few minority languages of Spain. (Asturian and its dialect Leonese have about a hundred thousand speakers total. It’s not a dialect of Spanish, and it’s not what you’d be learning in Spanish class, or spending a year in Madrid, or the like.)
In other words, “culu” means “ass” in a language that it’s highly unlikely a non-native speaker would learn. The theory that he chose “Culuket” because “culu” means “ass” is looking less and less likely.
Lance,
Your analysis that culu as ass “is looking less likely” is based on increasing reasonable doubt about the term. A valid strategy. Let’s look at your analysis:
1) You discount the reference to the urban dictionary — yet it is just based on an assertion, and does not offer any reasonable evidence that the urban dictionary is off base in its definitions.
2) You discount a bilingual speaker who has lived in Latin America, who offered a very concerte defintion.
3) You discount every language that does define “culu” as “ass”
4) You discount the defintion that Latin is the basis for the Culu name, of which that author then says is basis for its name in Spanish and Italian.
Even if all that were not true, you have pointed out that the orginial commenter who put this together did it to fit the theory. Yet, if one reads the Alt.com profile of Joe Price — and sees the amount of time the word “ass” and “anal” are used in the profile and on a page titled “culuket,” that we just jumped grabbed any defintion. When you place the word culu of which several languages define as “ass” on a sex profile page with several references to “ass” and “anal” the word choice, in our minds, looks more likely.
Er–for some reason, my reply ended up three comments too early. I don’t know if y’all can edit that, but it looks incredibly silly to have me responding to something that isn’t there yet.
Fair enough. Let’s consider these in turn.
(1) I do discount the reference to Urban Dictionary. I did in fact offer evidence that UD is offbase in its definitions–the fact that “Michael” is “Another term for insanity or mental illness. Looney, nuts, crazy, mental, coo-coo, completely fucked in the head.” For a few words nearby “culu” that help demonstrate the general unreliability of UD, see culuntry (no other webhits), culumbia noogermuffin (no other webhits, and highly physiologically unlikely), or culyat (no webhits other than as a name). In short: Urban Dictionary is a relatively unregulated site where people can post whatever words with whatever definitions they like; finding a word defined there (at least without significant “thumbs up” votes, as in the nearby “cum” entry) is evidence only for the fact that one person thought it was right.
(2) I did, alas, discount a bilingual speaker. Understand that I hate doing so, because (as, let me be clear, a professional linguist) I take people’s knowledge of their native languages as a basic fact of the world. All the same, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any reliable evidence to back him up (see 1, 3, 4) makes me wonder if he’s mistaken about the fact–if “culu” means “ass” in Spanish, why doesn’t it ever seem to appear on the web? (Plus, again, there’s that first link you posted in your prior comment, in which a Spanish speaker says that “culu” isn’t Spanish.)
(3) I don’t per se discount every language that does have “culu” as a word meaning “ass”. What I discount is the likelihood that Joe Price would know any of these languages well enough to use a word from it as part of his online identity. Where would he have ever encountered enough Asturian speech to have picked up the word? That’s what I find extremely unlikely. I’m willing to believe he might pick a word from Spanish (if, again, we knew that he knew Spanish well enough, which is possible); I’m not willing to believe he would pick a word from a language he’s never heard spoken.
(4) I don’t discount the Latin basis. However, in Latin, the word was culus, and had various inflected forms like “culo” (to an ass) and “culi” (asses, or of an ass) and “cule” (in the unlikely case that you’re addressing someone’s ass). But “culu” wasn’t one of them.
Basically, picking “culu-” to mean “ass” is rather like saying “I want to indicate ‘friend of David’, and in Spanish ‘friend’ is ‘amigo’, so I’ll go with amigudave“. Why would I choose that as opposed to “amigodave” or “amicusdave” or whatever? That’s what I’m finding just too far-fetched about this theory.
—
Of course, in the end (pardon the expression), there’s the fact that he used “Culuket” on a page with a lot of references to asses. That’s true; I can’t deny that. But then again, you yourselves have made the point that he used “Culuket” in all kinds of contexts, including utterly mundane and non-sexual ones. If the clear fact were “He picked ‘Culuket’ to describe his sexual interests; what could it mean?”, then “ass” might in fact be a decent speculation. But the only clear fact is “He picked ‘Culuket’ as a screen name”. The fact that I use the name on my email in both web forums and a puzzle organization doesn’t mean that it in any way indicates my attitude towards any one of those activities; it’s in fact derived from something else entirely.
And to again stress the point that I made elsewhere: even given that last point, the point that it’s “likely” that “culu” is a reference to anal activity (though I’d go with “possible” or “plausible”), that really, really doesn’t warrant drawing conclusions about it the way y’all have here. At best, you have “If we’re right, here are some other things that may be true”–but that’s not enough to present them as actually true, which is what was done in the post linked there.
In the end, my point is that speculation is well and good, but it’s nothing more than speculation; it’s not evidence. (And let me stress that even though I chose the word “speculation” and that bears a resemblance to “speculum”, I am in no way indicating an interest in speculum use.)
OK, another linguist here, with an off-the-wall possibility (but hey, maybe my thinking this could be an anagram will spark other ideas?) (BTW, as a linguist, I’d have to agree with Lance’s reasoning above. “Culo” is the usual Spanish word for “ass”, though there are, I believe, Spanish dialects (that are closer to Portuguese), that pronounce the final -o as a -u (like Portuguese itself; this may be what the native speaker is referring to. In standard Spanish, to my knowledge, words do not end in -u). But the likelihood that Joe would use a word from a Spanish (or Italian) dialect is, at best, unlikely. If he meant it to be “ass” he’d probably just have used the more commonly known “culo”. Now, onto another theory…
My first thought when I saw this was that it was an anagram. One possible solution would be: “uke cult”. “Uke” is an anime/manga fan fiction term (I believe originally from the martial arts world?) to mean “bottom”, or the passive person in a gay relationship. (It literally means ‘receiver’, from the Japanese verb “ukeru”.) So it could be “the cult of the Bottoms”. I recall that Dylan had an Asian fascination and is a writer, perhaps he helped Joe to fashion this? Any idea if he was into Anime/Managa?
(admittedly, unlikely, but maybe someone else can come up with a better anagram??)
cut Luke
fascinating, I have no idea if it’s pertinent, but very interesting.
Fascinating!
FWIW, I have a rusty degree in Spanish, and there are a couple words that end in “u” – espíritu, tú, tiramizú, menú. The last two words originate from other languages, I believe.
Not to hijack this thread, but, I’m looking for spanish classes and I have no idea how to find them… do you have any info on this spanish lessons provider? Its located in Chicago, not too far from my apartment I can’t find reviews on them — Spanish Classes Chicago, 305 South Federal St, Chicago, IL 60604 – (773) 417-5396