COCK as vernacular pop adjectival

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Sunday, March 21, 2004 7:54 pm -0500 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

(someone elsewrote)
>
>> There is "cock" (adj.) in US English although I've only heard it rarely
>> myself, back around 1970 I think. It is in HDAS (sense 2). It is like
>> "cool" or "boss" or "dope" or ....
>>
>> The Singaporean examples quoted on the 'insultmonger' site seem to give
>> "cock" as an English gloss for Fukienese "lan jiao" (= "penis") etc. I
>> don't know that an English adjective "cock" is being referred to here.
>>
>> I believe Singapore-English "talk[ing] cock" = "talk[ing] nonsense" or so
>> (cf "poppycock").
>
> which brings us back to "caca"/"cack", given that "poppycock" <
> "papekak", soft dung


And since one also hears 'talking cack', this still looks to me like it's
'cack' imported as 'cock' into singapore english (feces not penes).

But, oh well, Ron doesn't agree...

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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