An early "cock"?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 12:34:00PM -0400, Charles Doyle wrote:
> Let me clarify:  Joel's (late-medieval?) "cock" poem is
> definitely BAWDY; that was obvious to me even before I read
> Ron's extensive exegesis!  The question is about the lexical
> status of the word "cock."  The fact that "cock" in the poem
> might present a commonplace metaphor, not "just a novel
> extended metaphor" or "some new clever metaphor that nobody
> had ever thought of before" (Ron's words), doesn't make the
> WORD "cock" a synonym for "penis."  It just makes the cock
> in the poem a SYMBOL for the penis, quite possibly a
> conventional symbol.  Other poems have compared candles,
> snakes, flutes--all manner of "phallic" objects--with
> penises; and riddles have compared submarines, pencils, and
> chewing gum with penises. But we don't say that the WORDS
> mean 'penis'.

Has anyone bothered to point out yet that this passage is
given as the first example of _cock_ 'penis' in HDAS?

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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