arm:leg =? penis:vagina

[Ronald Butters]

Larry, I don't understand how this "supports" JL's argument. As I understand his point, it is in part that it is extremely unlikely that today anybody would decide to revise their previously masculine sense of COCK to extend it to females as well (except for weird people who are allegedly motivated by "postmodernism"). I don't disagree with that, but it is irrelevant in that, so far as I know, nobody would support a contrary position.

On the other hand, the historical record is quite clear. In some dialects of American English, COCK meant 'vagina' and (so it has been reported) 'penis' as well. JL apparently asserts that this could not possibly be true--that nobody could have believed that the term to refer to both. Are you saying that people somewhere in history "began moving up one level from the salient basic level" of COCK = 'penis' to COCK = 'penis+vagina'? I don't see how that supports JL's assertion--it seems to me that it contradicts it, since it REQUIRES that there were people for whom COCK = 'penis+vagina', which JL apparently explicitly denies.

Whatever the historical ordering of linguistic change, there is no doubt that, at least as recently as the mid-20th Century, there were people for whom COCK referred to 'vagina'; and there have been serious scholarly reports that, for some of those people, COCK referred to genitalia without regard to the sexual kind of genitalia. The scholarship may be wrong, but a priori arguments that one or another kind of linguistic change "could not have taken place" do not seem to me to hold much promise. My own guess is that COCK = 'penis' came first, that some confusion ensued among people who were not sure just what it referred to, that for some people, COCK came to refer to genitalia in general, while others specialized it for female genitalia, and the latter won out in a few of the generalist communities. But that is just a stands-to-reason guess.

A parallel situation perhaps pertains to the verb FUCK. A sentence such as "Chris fucked Pat" (or "Pat fucked for Chris") would mean to some people only that Chris inserted something into Pat. For others, it means no more than "Chris and Pat fucked," i.e., the inserter and the insertee are not entailed by "Chris fucked Pat" (though perhaps still implied, if not entailed, by the rather archaic-sounding "Pat fucked for Chris").

On Aug 16, 2011, at 3:49 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> Which was one of the points I was trying to make (perhaps too tersely) in my own previous message.  But as also mentioned there, the "limb" analogy works to Jon's benefit, not detriment, since that too is a case of moving up one level from the salient basic level to avoid specificity for one of a number of reasons.  It's not an accident that "limb" served as a replacement of "leg" in the Victorian era (even for "piano limbs"), or at least in our historical mythography of that era; it's essentially the "privates" of the jointed-appendage field.

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