"Cock"

[Baker, John]

        I'm not sure why euphemisms don't count, or why we're assuming
that "cock" is the basic term.  I have more than one word in my
wordhoard with the applicable meaning, and I assume that those speakers
did too.  For all I know, some of these speakers did consider "cock" to
be a euphemism.  It's no more unlikely than the historically attested
fact that "prick" was once a euphemism for "pintle."

        Of course, I don't actually know that there ever were any people
who had "cock" as a unisex term.  But if not, how do you account for its
transmigration across the gender line?


John Baker



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 2:22 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Cock"

>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?

"Limb" is hardly comparable. Arms and legs are more similar in terms of
everyday perceptions and emotive associations than penises and vaginas.
And
those are what we're talking about.

Of course, that's only my opinion.

JL

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