COCK as vernacular pop adjectival

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Sunday, March 21, 2004 12:36 pm -0500 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:> I
found this at

> <http://www.talkingcock.com/html/sections.php?op=3Dviewartic= le&
> artid=3D33>, which comes from Singapore; "cock" here appears to be
> adjectiva= l,=20
> not attribtive:
>
> "Yah, I heard about Ah Seng. I'm not surprised. It was an absolutely
> cock=20 idea!"


I'm betting that this has more to do with feces as with penes (my preferred
plural of penis).

British English has the word _cack_, which means 'feces' or 'to defecate
in' (e.g., _cack one's pants_).  If you google 'cack idea', you'll get lots
of examples from the UK and Australia.  It may be that 'cock' is how it's
spelt in Singapore English--or that this writer has misspelt it or
folk-etymologied it over to 'cock' (if they didn't know 'cack').

Incidentally, this word always comes up when I discuss the word 'khaki'
with English people (it comes up a lot...).  In the UK, it's pronounced
like US 'car key'--with a definite /r/ in it (though NODE doesn't show
this).  The t-shirt shop round the corner from my house has even spelt it
'kharki' in their ad.  When I've asked why there's an 'r' in it, I've been
told that otherwise it would sound like 'cocky', which would be confusing.
I point out that Americans get round this by pronouncing it with an /ae/,
and they point out that that would sound like _cacky_ 'shitty' in British
English.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics

Department of Linguistics and English Language
Arts B133
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QN
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