[Ads-l] Will differential treatment _never_ end?

[Laurence Horn]

> On Sep 27, 2017, at 4:05 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>     I know several guys that still hang onto their Dicks. You'd think
> they'd change their name to Rich, Richie, Rick or Ricky. On facebook, they
> can get endless double-entendre teasing, yet shamelessly -- if not proudly
> -- flaunt that handle to friend & foe alike, birthday or not. I call it
> UrbanDic Résistance, a recalcitrant refusal to euphemize one's language
> use, thus caught betwixt a sinkhole of degeneracy and a tsunami of
> political correctness. (Though Dickie doesn't sound too bad at all; used by
> close facebook friends & relatives on birthdays, I would guess. Does seem
> to lose the connection with penis that way.)
>     [kahk], on the other hand, is really nasty. Maybe because the jaws are
> maximally open during articulation, whereas [dIk] has the mouth almost
> shut. (I've heard <cock sucker>, but *<dick sucker> rings no bells.) I've
> noted several men with surname <Koch> making efforts to deter people from
> saying [kahk]:  It's Mr Coke-Is-It (failed legal name change some years
> ago) and NYC Mayor [kotch].
>     Conclusion:  On the tabu scale, <dick> is weakly tabuized compared to
> strongly tabuized <cock>.
> 
The trendy Amazon TV series “I Love Dick”--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Dick_(TV_series)--probably wouldn’t have made it as “I Love Cock”.  Or if it had, there wouldn’t have been the same opportunity for a pun in the name of the character Kevin Bacon plays, in part because even if a fellow did pronounce his (last) name [kahk], he’d spell it Koch (or Kock).   Actually, now that I think of it, “I Love Koch” might just work...

LH

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