"Cock"

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:15 PM -0500 2/10/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Re: female cocks.
>
>1835-36 _Fanny Hill's Bang-Up Reciter_ (Facsimile rpt. London: P. R. Wells,
>1965) 16:
>In wedlock's bands they soon were joined,/ In hymen's holy fetters,/ He
>found her cock, and his one too/ And he put them both together.
>
>A PDF is visible here:
>http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1830s/1836--1965_fanny_hills_bang-up_reciter_friskey_songster_(PB)/index.htm
>
>The whole silly song ("a rummy chaunt") turns on an old maid's loss of her
>favorite rooster.
>The hero appears and makes things better than before. So conceivably, and
>despite the verbal inspiration behind the song, this use of the metaphor has
>nothing to do with American Southern usage.
>
>Conceivably.
>
>JL

Very nice, especially the site itself, "www.horntip.com". I must have
registered that one when I wasn't paying attention.

In our thread ("a cock-and-cock story") from last summer, I was
wondering whether there were dialects displaying "organ-neutrality"
for _cock_, contra the anecdotal evidence for complementary
distribution in current usage based on comments by Wilson et al., and
from the  passage in De Camp & Hancock [!] (1974) at
http://tinyurl.com/37r5vgp.

Jon's (HDAS) Alfren Doten cite is roughly contemporaneous with the
Reciter above, but in the U.S., not the old country--he left his
native Massachusetts for California during the '49er gold rush and
established himself in Nevada (where "he was active in the Republican
party", palled around with Mark Twain, and kept his famous
79-leather-bound-volume diary from 1849 until his death in 1903).

1867 Doten _Journals_ II 857 [In cipher.] We felt of each other's
cocks...and then she got on and fucked me bully.

No pet rooster was involved here, I take it...

L

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