(This article first appeared in the June Lexpert under the title "Rhymes With Lass."
Why
the names of some animals fell from grace
by
Howard Richler
This
past January I listened to a podcast at lexiconvalley@slate.com
that discussed the proclivity of New Yorkers to drop their Rs in
speech. This phenomenon is known to linguists as non-rhoticity and is
common to several English accents in North America and abroad.
It is
hard to think of a more quintessential New Yorker than Woody Allen,
and probably as a result podcast host Mike Vuolo by way of example of
this speech pattern played this line by Woody Allen's neurotic
character Mickey in the movie Hannah and Her
Sisters: “Oh God, there's a tumor
in my head the size of a basketball.” Of
course, when Woody's character
delivers
the line, the italicized growth is rendered R-less as
too-muh.
As traumatic as this event may have been to the
hypochondriac character, all we see with this non-rhoticity is a
change in pronunciation. There is however, an example where this
process led to a whole new word.
Nowadays
the word “arse” is seem by some to be a euphemism for “ass”
but in fact the former word for the posterior precedes the latter
being first recorded in the year 1000 whereas the latter use is not
found until the 19th
century. Of course, the word “ass” to refer (as the OED
phrases it) as a “quadruped of the horse kind” also is found as
far back as the 11th
century, and herein lay a problem.
For
as non-rhoticity became prevalent in the 18th
century, it just would not do for
any wholesome “lass” to rhyme with the newly pronounced “arse,”
as “ass,” and it became proper to avoid using this term around
1760. Hugh Rawson relates in his Dictionary
of
Euphemism and other Doubletalk
that “pre-Victorians became
nervous about calling the barnyard critter, the ass by its rightful
name, because the three-letter word sounded like the bad four-letter
one when the “r” was dropped.” Enter donkey.
But
donkey did not emerge as the definitive ass substitute immediately.
For about 50 years the word “neddy” was used as frequently as
donkey. By 1830 donkey was ensconced as the heir apparent. The usual
etymological explanation of donkey is that it descends from the word
“dun,” meaning brownish grey, and that the “k” in donkey was
added to make it rhyme with monkey, which it did originally.
The
donkey was not the only animal that was created due to language
sensitivity. According to the OED,
a rabbit originally referred to the young long-eared mammal of the
“Oryctolagus cuniculus, order Lagomorpha” whereas the adults were
called “cony” “coney”or “cunny” and the word was
pronounced to rhyme with “honey.” Herein lies the root of why the
word became improper. Cony was used as a term of endearment for a
woman by the 16th
century and a reference to her genitalia by the next century.
Thus
the word “cony,” which referred to the adult of the species was
deemed to have too much of an “adult” sense and it was replaced
in the 19th century by the word “rabbit.” There still remained
the problem of what to do when reading the Bible, where cony was
firmly entrenched. In 1836 Benjamin H. Smart found a solution. The
OED tells us that for “solemn
reading” Smart ordained that what previously rhymed with “honey”
would henceforth rhyme with “bony.”
Needless
to say, the word cock to refer to the male fowl has been
unceremoniously ousted by rooster. Even more insulting, however, is
the fact that many words featuring cock have been bowdlerized.
Apricots were once apricocks or apricox, haystacks were originally
haycocks, and weather vanes were once weathercocks. Even people’s
names were subject to the expunging of cocks. Nineteenth century
author Louisa May Alcott was so named because her father had changed
the family name from Alcox. Canadian author T.C. Haliburton was
probably having sport, however, in his 1844 novel Sam Slick, when he
has a young man tell a young woman that her brother had become not a
“coxswain” in the navy, but a “rooster-swain.”
Unfortunately
the proud cock developed figurative associations. Shakespeare had
more in mind than the bearing of arms in Henry V when Pistol yells at
Nym: “Pistol’s cock is up.” When cock’s allusions became
widely enough known among puerile males, the term became indecent
and unspeakable in polite company. Open the barn door for rooster.
The
first citation of rooster in the OED is
an American reference from 1772. The word was still unusual enough
in England 50 years later that James Flint in his 1822
Letters from America had to explain to
British readers that “rooster, or he-bird, is the male of the hen.”
So in
place of the evocative onomatopoeic word cock, we have the mediocre
word rooster, (i.e., he who roosts) as the definitive word for this
animal. And unlike Jesus, who may have been denied three times by
Peter, we are denied three proud Biblical words: ass, cony, and
cock.
Howard's
book How Happy Became Homosexual and Other
Mysterious Semantic Shifts was published in
May 2013 by Ronsdale Press of Vancouver.
