[Janice D. Soderling]

Since the Word Nerd and Nitpicker's Club is having its Annual Convention in town this week, and because I didn't know the word and because not knowing would keep me awake at night, I looked for it.

Found it with a different spelling "cushty" in my ODE which says adj. Brit. informal "very good or pleasing; he's got a cushty set-up.

And for the übernerds among us, I will pass on the origins (origin- 1920s. from Romany kushto, kushti 'good' perhaps influenced by CUSHY.

Just for the heck of it, I checked the infamous, half-literate and sex-obsessed Urban Dictionary which I don't really trust but which uses the spelling "cushtie", and it sez:

1. cushtie cool or okay. You got a bj last night? Cushtie.

2. cushtie good, sweet, alright, comfortabe im cushtie wit at
meaning i am compfortable with that

or if someone says how are you u say cushtie

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cushtie

More to the point of this thread, I was glad to get all of the links and information to Filipino poetry and not least the information about the linguistic population. Makes one stop and rethink one's lingo-centric position, doesn't it.

Jodie sez:

(Believe it or not, the Philippines has the fourth largest population of English speakers in the world, with more speakers than Canada and Australia combined; only the U.S., India, and the U.K. have more English speakers.)