query: a cock and cock story

[Laurence Horn]

We've discussed the existence of slang "cock" in
AAVE and Southern white English with the sense
of (as glossed in PADS 1944) of "pudenda
muliebra". Wilson in particular has stressed the
ubiquity of this use across wide swaths of the
south across racial lines, and among African
American speakers in other regions, at least in
earlier decades.  In a posting from last May 26,
for example, he writes:

>And then there's the conundrum that "cock"
>and "pussy" had *absolutely* the same referent and no other: vagina,
>female genitalia, among black speakers.
>
>To this very day, reading um-literature, primarily written by white
>authors, takes unusual effort because of the use of _cock_ to mean
>"penis." "Had a cockstand"? Huh? Oh, right. He means, "was on the
>bone." Like, can *you* imagine reading, "_He_ put _his_ hand on _her_
>cock and began to fondle it"? Yet, that was precisely what a black
>um-writer, had there been any in the 20th century, would have written,
>without giving it a second thought. So, you can imagine the jarring
>effect of trying to read a book containing sentences like, "_She_ put
>_her_ hand on _his_ cock" on the average black reader of
>um-literature, back in the day.

I've been looking at the relationship between the
two "cock"s in question for a project on what I
call enantionymy and others call antilogy, Janus
words, anti-antonyms, contranyms, _Gegensinn_
[Freud et al.], or just "words that are their own
opposites"; Linguist List had a rather massive
thread on this topic, with some spinoff here, in
the 1990s.  Not that male and female genitalia
are automatically "opposite", but that issue of
how to define antonymy arises with many other
such words, so here goes.

HDAS, of course, has entries for both COCK 1a.
'the penis --usu. considered vulgar', with cites
back to ca. 1450 *and* COCK 3. 'So. and Black E.
a. the vulva or vagina, CUNT. b. copulation with
a woman. (Both are "usu. considered vulgar".)

Cites begin in the 19th c., with:
1867 Doten _Journals_ II 857 [In cipher.] We felt
of each other's cocks...and then she got on and
fucked me bully.

(Jon, do you recall if the writer/narrator is
male or female?  That would be nice to know.)

A. W. Read gives this nice quatrain from Lexical Evidence (1928):
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
If it wasn't for your cock
My prick would rust
(written to a woman, one assumes)

But the OED only sports cocks of the male persuasion:
("Pudoris causa"--gotta love it.)
==================
20. = Penis: Ger. hahn, hähnchen.
(The current name among the people, but, _pudoris
causa_, not admissible in polite speech or
literature; in scientific language the Latin is
used. In origin perhaps intimately connected with
sense 12 [= 'A spout or short pipe serving as a
channel for passing liquids through, and having
an appliance for regulating or stopping the flow;
a tap'--LH])

1618 N. FIELD Amends for Ladies 1, Oh man what
art thou? When thy cock is up? 1714 Cabinet of
Love, View my sore cock, his tender wounded head.
1730-36 in BAILEY (Folio). 1737 tr. Rabelais I.
185 note. [So in ed. 1807 (Longmans, etc.) I.
169, and ed. 1849 (Bohn) I. 135.] 1967 A. S.
BYATT Game xvii. 233 Guts and cock and
all,..every little bit except the hair and teeth.
1969 Landfall XXIII. 107 'She had her hand on his
cock.' 'There's no need to be crude.'
===================
(Wilson must have had the contributor of that
last datum in mind in his discussion above.)

But none of the 23 senses under "COCK, n. 1"
include reference to female genitalia...er,
pudenda. And while there are 8 other separate
nominal entries for other COCKs (actually 7.5,
since one of them reflects an erroneous entry of
Dr. Johnson's), not one bears any connection to
the HDAS-3 meaning. So my queries, to any and all:

(i) Are there dialects/speakers who freely use
both "cock" lexemes?  Or is this only a problem
for Wilsonians who shuttle between the two groups
of speakers?  Presumably the situation would be
like that for U.S./British English commuters who
have to deal with "pissed" ('angry' vs. 'drunk'),
"pants" ('trousers' vs. 'panties'), "knocked up"
('impregnate' vs. 'awaken by knocking'), only
with perhaps more embarrassing consequences.
(Lynne Murphy, if she's on the list at the
moment, will probably have better examples.)  A
pretty close match is "(woman's) fanny" (in the
back or the front?), as we've also discussed on
the list.  The difference is that there's no
ocean between the two "cock" dialects.  One cite
in the HDAS entry has "cock" as 'applied to both
the female pudendum and the male [!] penis'
[McAtee 1942], but it's unclear to me whether
it's so applied by the same individuals or within
the same dialect subgroup.  Of course euphemistic
and scientific superordinate terms like
"privates" or "genitals/genitalia" are ungendered
(see previous post), but the basic level slang
terms tend to be differentiated.

(ii) Do we know the derivation of the female
"cock"?  Is there any independent justification
for the plausible-sounding suggestion in the HDAS
entry that it is "perh. fr. obs. Eng. dial. COCK
'cockle, shell-fish'", and thus cognate with
"conch" as well as of course "cockle"?  The
etymology would sort of make sense, but I don't
know if there's anything else to go on here,
beyond an 1892 cite Jon draws our attention to
that mentions "cockle" as "vulgar parlance" for
the labia minora.

(iii) do we know why the OED wouldn't include
this sense of "cock", even under COCK, n. 4, the
shell-fish entry just mentioned above?  Is it
just that this sense is vanishingly rare in the
U.K.?

LH

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