"Cock" = rooster

[Jonathan Lighter]

OED expresses no doubt that the word has indeed denoted the organ since at least 1618.

  HDAS, based on a re-examination of long-available evidence, expresses no doubt that the same denotation existed as early as the mid-15th C. This claim is based partly on the content of the "Gentil Cok" and partly on the prior existence of synonymous "pilcock."

  Trivia bonus for cultural analysis:  There was a short-lived _Playboy_ imitation in the early '70's called _Coq_.  The cover of the debut issue featured a scantily-clad female model staring at a bottle of Coca-Cola. Discuss issues of intertextuality, translinguistic symbolism, phallocentricity, cultural transgressionism, self-referentiality, lookism, product placement.

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: "Cock" = rooster
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Not to flog a dead dolphin here, but let me reiterate:

The question was not whether a male chicken
SYMBOLIZES "sexuality" (in many instances, literary,
subliterary, and iconographic, it obviously has). Rather it
was whether 'penis' was a denotative meaing of the
WORD "cock" at certain points in history--a very different
(though obviously not unrelated) matter.

--Charlie
_______________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 20:05:16 -0400
>From: Wilson Gray
>Subject: "Cock" = rooster
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>---------------------- Information from the mail header ----
-------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster: Wilson Gray
>Subject: "Cock" = rooster
>------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>Alison writes:
>
>On the Cock thread, no-one who has ever kept chickens could
be in any doubt about the appropriateness of considering a
cock to be a symbol of sexuality. Roosters whole existence
seems to be wholly given over to strutting, bragging and
chasing hens.]
>
>Not to mention abusing them. When a rooster is through with
a hen, he will strike her with his spurs, if she doesn't get
out of his way quickly enough.
>
>-Wilson

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