"Cock"

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 16, 2011, at 2:22 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>> there must have been at least some speakers for whom
> "cock" was unisex.
>
> But - if there were - were they statistically significant? Or lone
> eccentrics?
>
> I'm not even sure that there *were* any (though of course there is always
> the truly odd and historically inconsequential exception).  It all depends
> on the dialectal distribution of the contrasting pairs. For a genuine
> tradition of unisex usage, you'd need not a community where the terms were
> generally accepted as interchangeable.  If anyone has any evidence of a
> speech community of that sort at any time on the history of English, please
> post.
>
> People who merely *know* of the synonymy under discussion (e.g., everybody
> on this thread), don't count unless they unselfconsciously use the word in a
> unisex manner. In other words, conceive of it as having a single meaning:
> "the male or female genitals: used indiscriminately."
>
> Euphemisms like "privates" don't count, because they *are* euphemisms: in
> other words, learned as tactful replacements for the basic terms. The basic
> terms are what we're talking about, no?

And "genitals", "genitalia", "reproductive organs", etc. don't count because they're scientific/technical, presumably, even if not euphemisms as such.
>
> "Limb" is hardly comparable. Arms and legs are more similar in terms of
> everyday perceptions and emotive associations than penises and vaginas.

I'm not sure how we could determine that definitively, depending on the perceptions/associations surveyed.

> And
> those are what we're talking about.

Another argument for Jon's position is precisely that very much like "limb", "privates" isn't a basic level category in Rosch's sense (supported by various empirical studies), but a superordinate.  Nobody would announce "Ouch, I broke my limb" or "Why did you punch me in the (upper left) limb?"  While "Chris kicked Robin in the genitals/privates" would work, it's only for the R- or at least PG13-rated nature of the basic level designations (or because "privates" is more general, precisely what may be needed when one doesn't know exactly which private was affected; "crotch" is sometimes handy for this purpose as well, or sometimes even "crouch", which does rhyme with "ouch").  By the same token, "person", while usefully sex-neutral for various purposes, isn't a basic level category either, which makes it less likely to succeed in various contexts as a replacement for "man"/"woman".

LH

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