query: a cock and cock story

[Jonathan Lighter]

True, but gender theorists are not quite the Vox Populi.  The possibility
that everyday usage in the South is in any way related to the conjectures
of intellectuals like Jacques Duval in the 16th C. seems remote indeed.

More relevant would be evidence that people who customarily refer to the
"vagina" by the rooster synonym customarily employ the same word for the
penis. (What evidence we do have suggests the opposite.) And even if some do
use the word that way, that alone would not mean that they consider the
organs to be meaningfully "the same."


JL


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Charles C Rice <cxr1086 at louisiana.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Rice <cxr1086 at LOUISIANA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: query: a cock and cock story
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jonathan Lighter [mailto:wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
> > Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2010 10:11 AM
> > Subject: Re: query: a cock and cock story
> >
> > Wouldn't "organ-neutrality" be kind of a postmodern concept for the Vox
> > Populi (Vox Dei) to have come up with a hundred and fifty or more years
> > ago?
> > I can't think of any English exx., unless you think the recent
> application
> > in umliterature of phallic words to the clitoris counts.  Actually, it
> > obviously does, but it's in the postmodern age where there's nothing but
> > words anyway.  I bet most of that umliterature stuff never even
> happened!
> >
> > But maybe I'm just being a spoilsport.  Who knows what thoughts flicked
> > through Philip Freneau's unconscious?
> >
> It's a standard of gender theory that Renaissance theories of gender saw
> women as failed men. The uterus and ovaries were the same organ(s) as the
> penis and testicles, but had failed to fall out due to a lack of heat
> during development. A woman had to stay away from strenuous exercise or
> her uterus would erupt as a penis.  See Greenblatt, Shakespearean
> Negotiations, Chap 3.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org