Why the names of some animals fell from grace

(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 19^th 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 11^th century, and herein lay a problem.

For as non-rhoticity became prevalent in the 18^th 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 16^th 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.