linguistic history

Fun Facts About English #93 – Cock

01/31/2021 by admin

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “rooster” originated in the United States in the mid- or late-18th century as a euphemism to avoid the sexual connotation of the word “cock.” The noun is derived from “roosting,” the bird’s habit of perching aloft to sleep at night.

The appearance of “rooster” in the written record signals a cultural and linguistic shift as Americans became more persnickety when speaking about their bodies and carnal natures. “Cock” was no longer acceptable for genteel and pious New Worlders in the late 18th century because of its close association to the male sexual organ. In the early 19th century a religious revival of born-again Christianity swept the United States. During this time, the proverbial axe came down on any vulgar associations to a phallus:

cockhorse – riding horse
haycock – haystack
weathercock – weathervane
shuttlecock – birdie
drain cock/stop cock – drain valve

Even suggestive surnames were subject to this lingual henpecking party. For hundreds of years, family names suggested their history with the domesticated fowl, like Hitchcock, Handcock, Wilcox, and Alcox. The father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, changed his last name from Alcock to Alcott in the early 19th century out of “professional concerns” during his teaching career.

The Bird and The Organ

The word “cock” is from Old English cocc meaning “male bird” and appears to be of German origin. Cocken and cocky were Old English slang for “one who swaggers or struts like a cock.” By the 17th century, “cock” was a general term for a “fellow, man, or chap,” as in “an old cock.” Age-old idioms and classifiers that include “cock” abound:

cock one’s hat – an aggressive or fighting attitude
cocked ear – to listen carefully
cock of the walk – a dominating attitude
cocksure – arrogantly confident
cock and bull story – an unbelievable tale
cockpit – cock-fighting ring
gamecock – hell-rooster, hell-kite; a fierce fighter
cocker-spaniel – a dog bred to flush woodcocks
cocktail – the high standing tail of a bird; docked tail of a pedigree horse; analogous for an alcoholic beverage in high society
billycock – a type of felt hat similar to a derby; from bullycock – to cock one’s hat in a swashbuckling fashion

The first two lines of the popular English nursery rhyme “Cock a doodle do!” first appeared in 1606 in a murder pamphlet (lurid accounts of gruesome murders, confessions, and executions, similar to our own genre of “True Crime” detective stories). The full rhyme was recorded in London in Mother Goose’s Melody in 1776:

Cock a doodle do!
My dame has lost her shoe,
My master’s lost his fiddlestick,
And knows not what to do.

Commercial business using cock — Click to make larger

The earliest allusions to the penis is pillicock, attested from the early 14th century in the Anglo-Irish The Kildare Lyrics, a poem complaining of the effects of old age:

“Y ne mai no more of loue done; Mi pilkoc pisseþ on mi schone” (I may no longer make love, my cock pisses on my shoe).

There’s also Middle English fide-cok, where fid means “a peg or plug.”

The reasons why “cock” became so closely associated with “penis” are numerous but speculative at best. The common traits of “rising in the morning” and the euphemistic “choking the chicken” for masturbation are humorous but not definitive. The rooster’s aggressiveness, its virility, the upright curvature of its neck with hackles that flare when excited, not to mention its pendulous wattles, are some of the ideas people have asserted for the cultural connection. Regardless, it’s a lot of conjecture considering a cock doesn’t even have a penis. (Through testes located high up in the body, sperm transfer occurs by cloacal contact between the cockerel and the hen known as the “cloacal kiss.”)

No matter how sheepish Americans might be, the word “cock” has been synonymous with “penis” for a very long time. Though “rooster” is a perfectly fine word, the original intent to disappear “cock” is prudish hogwash. The British, with a clearer grasp on context, still use the word without offense or fear of being vulgar. In the end, the animal has crossed with our culture to become not only an enduring symbol of our farming past but continues to be one of our most valued sources of sustenance. Like pigs, pussies, and asses, cocks also provide a wealth of reflections on our own undeniable human behavior.

If you enjoyed this bit of history, you may also enjoy learning about (NSFW) expletive infixations, the strange adjectival order of “Big Bad Wolf,” or why some words become fossilized!

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Fun Facts About English #37 – Words That End in -gry

12/27/2019 by admin

Though hangry was included in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) in the 1990s, only time will tell how long this relatively recent (1918) portmanteau will be with us. Surprising as it is that so few words end in -gry, equally interesting are some of the uncommon, archaic, and obsolete -gry words that have fallen out of use.

Going back to Old and Middle English, archaic variations and compounds using the words hungry and angry were numerous! Consider such colorful expressions as anhungry, unhungry, dog-hungry, meat-hungry, wind-hungry, ever-angry, fire-angry, half-angry, heat-angry, self-angry, and tear-angry.

As for uncommon words, let’s start with gry itself. This extremely rare word is defined as 1/10 of a line and was marked as obsolete in the 1934 Second New International Dictionary.

Other uncommon words include aggry, (a variegated glass bead found in Ghana and England), and meagry (a variation on the word meager). Foreign vocables turned into English-appearing words include the Hindi word puggry (a cloth wrapped around a sun helmet), or the Egyptian word iggry (a word that translates as, ‘Hurry up!’)

In researching this Fun Fact, I unwittingly smacked into a popular -gry riddle — just the kind to leave you feeling half-angry when you’re forced to say, “I giveth up.” You’ll find the answer at the end of this post. Good luck.

Riddle
Think of three words ending in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is. (Hint: the answer is NOT hangry.)

If you found this interesting to read, you might enjoy learning about the rules of stacked adjectives, why the word we is so unique among languages, or the history of counters like, “A murder of crows”!

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Answer
With the question about -gry words being a kind of smokescreen, the rest of the riddle is interpreted to mean “What is the third word in the three-word phrase the English language?” The answer is “language” — something we use every day. Ugh, right!?

Fun Facts About English #34 – Orange

12/04/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 34 Kinney Brothers Publishing

To understand the pronunciation of the Old English word ġeoluhrēad, one must understand Old Saxon and its orthographic translation from Germanic runes into Latin script. For example, the Old English ġ could be pronounced like y in the word yes. The diphthong ēa would have been pronounced as a short e as in bread. So, even to contemporary English speakers, it is likely ġeolu (yellow) and rēad (red) would be understood as yelu-red.

Kinney Brothers Publishing English timeline

It would, however, be a mistake to assume the absence of a single word for orange was due to a cultural lack in perceptual nuances. There were two combinations of words in Old English to refer to orange. One included crog, the common word for saffron. Orange was called ġeoluhrēad (yellow-red) for reddish-orange and ġeoluhcrog (yellow-saffron) for yellowish-orange.

Which came first, the fruit or the color?

Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The English name of the fruit comes from the Old French word pomme d’orange. The French word, in turn, is from the Italian word arancia, based on the Arabic word nāranj, which was acquired from the Sanskrit word nāraṅga (नारङ्ग). So, to dispel any arguments, the word for the color orange was derived from the fruit and not the other way around.

The first instance of the English word orange being recorded as a color is found in a description for clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, in 1502.

So, now you know.

Did you know the word scientist wasn’t coined until 1834? Why do Americans say /zee/ and the rest of the world says /zed/? An early spelling of Chicago was Stktschagko! Do you have Dimples of Venus or Morton’s Toe? There’s so much to learn on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

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Fun Facts About English #33 – Latin Script

11/29/2019 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The Latin script that we know today originated in the 7th century BC and is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. Also known as Roman script, it is derived from Greek and Etruscan alphabets. In the Middle Ages, the Roman script replaced the runic alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons and is often referred to as simply the “alphabet” – a Latin combination of the first two Greek letters alpha and beta.

letter transformations Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

Old English as a spoken language was a form of West Germanic dialects. It was first written in a runic alphabet brought with Anglo-Saxon settlers starting in the 5th century. Very few examples of this form of written English have survived, most being short inscriptions or fragments.

Franks Casket KInney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The Latin script was introduced by Christian missionaries from about the 7th century. It began to replace the Anglo-Saxon runes though the two continued in parallel for some time. As such, the Old English alphabet began to employ parts of the Roman alphabet in its construction.

English Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The adopted Roman alphabet was made up of 23 letters that included Etruscan characters plus the Greek letters Y and Z. The English names of the Latin letters are, for the most part, direct descendants via French, Latin, and Etruscan. At the time, there were no lower case letters and they wouldn’t appear until the 9th century.

The combination of upper case and lower case letters in a dual alphabet system first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814). It soon became very common to mix the cases within a word with the upper case to add emphasis.

In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the order of the English alphabet with a combination of Latin, modified Latin, and Old English characters. He first listed the 23 letters of the Latin alphabet plus the ampersand. Additional characters included the Latin shorthand symbol for and (⁊), the Old English letters Ƿ and Þ, and finally, the modified Latin letters Ð and Æ.

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ& ⁊ǷÞÐÆ

The letters J, U, and W weren’t included in the alphabet until the 16th century. In Roman numerals, J was originally used as a swash variation of the number I when multiple I’s appeared together, as in XXIIJ. Likewise, U and V were one and the same, the only difference being the pointed v form was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded u form was used in the middle or end of a word. The shift from the digraph VV or double u to the distinct ligature W was gradual. Though considered a separate letter by the 14th century, W remained an outsider with complaints that few knew what to do with it.

Finally, the seventh Greek letter Z (zeta) had been adopted from Etruscan as part of the original Roman alphabet but was replaced with the letter G, only to be added again to the end of the list in the 1st century BC. Z was rarely used simply because it is not a native Latin sound. Old English adopted the Roman alphabet after Z had been recast as the last letter.

As for the name of the letter Z, the older pronunciation of zed was inherited from Old French. The American zee was also a British English dialectal form during the 17th century and was likely influenced by the pronunciation pattern bee, cee, dee, pee, tee, etc. The pronunciation zee was given its American stamp of approval by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828.

You might also be interested in learning more about the Greek alphabet, the language of the ancient gods, the origins of lord, lady and other gender nouns, or what a fossilized word is!

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Fun Facts About English #6 – The Word With the Most Definitions

05/13/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 6 Kinney Brothers Publishing

The 1989 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists set with 430 definitions. Although the next printed edition of the OED won’t be published until 2037, its chief editor has announced that run now has 645 definitions.

The OED is the principal historical dictionary of the English language published by Oxford University Press. It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world. The second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989. The chief executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that the third edition will ever be printed and will appear only in electronic form.

The making of the Oxford English Dictionary is an equally extraordinary story! Here are just a few tidbits about the 70-year effort to bring the work to completion in 1928.

The OED was crowd-sourced!

The editors enlisted the help of the public asking readers to send examples of sentences that could illuminate the meanings of different words. Volunteers mailed thousands of “quotation slips” every day. The first edition was published with the help of more than 2000 volunteers.

The co-founder, Frederick Furnivall was a colorful figure.

Furnivall had a controversy-riddled Shakespeare Society and was also in a six-year feud with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. They often traded public insults. Swinburne mocked Furnivall’s club by calling it “Fartiwell and Co.” and “The Sh*tspeare Society.” Furnivall returned the insult saying Swinburne had “the ear of a poetaster (inferior writer), hairy, thick and dull.”

The most prolific contributor to the OED was a madman.

Sri-Lankan-born, William C. Minor, was an American ex-pat and paranoid schizophrenic who was institutionalized for murder in England. He was confined to Britain’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmore, a fact that OED editor, James Murray, was unaware of until he visited the lexicographical researcher in his jail cell.

If you are looking for an entertaining read, The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, is “an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history.”

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in the making of the first dictionary of the English language, why Americans say zee instead of zed, or how the rhotic /r/ sound changed in Britain!

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