I understand that the word "rooster" came into use because the Victorians were embarassed to use the name that had been used for centuries for the male chicken: "cock".
Is that true?
More generally, I imagine that a fair number of words were created, or became more common, as euphemisms for terms that embarassed prissy Victorians. What are some of them?
This reminds me of the history of the word coq 'cock' in French. Latin gallus 'cock' and cattus would've merged into a single homonym, and so, the Latinate word for rooster was replaced by a new one. I'll try to find the reference. This may have been true in the Gascon dialect and not for standard (Isle de France) French.
I understand that the word "rooster" came into use because the Victorians were embarassed to use the name that had been used for centuries for the male chicken: "cock".
Possibly. But I suspect it was the American Victorians. We still use the word cock (or cockerel) without any problems.
Although I recall that my mention of the Dorking Cockerel caused much amusement amongst some Americans. Strange, really, because the Dorking is a breed recognised in the USA. See here http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/CGD/Dorks/BRKDorks.html
Of course, the word "dork" means nothing in the UK.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
OED's entry for rooster sheds no light on this, but its entry for cock says, "Often called in U.S., as in Kent, rooster." So it seems to say that 'rooster' is largely a US usage.
Quote: We still use the word cock (or cockerel) Would you also use the word 'rooster', or is that an atypical word in the UK?
Tying it in with the periodic thread elsewhere, do you say stopcock or stop, rooster? And what about petcock? Maybe I'll prepare coq au vin today for luncheon. La!
Per research: "Rooster" did indeed come into use as a prudish substitute for "cock" -- and Richard is right that this happened in the US, not the UK.
Mencken reports it well in his American Language.
The American people, once the most prudish on earth, took on a certain defiant looseness [later]. ... The rage for euphemism which arose during Puritan times was quickly transferred to the American colonies. ... The nasty revival of prudery associated with the name of Victoria went to extreme lengths in the United States, and proceeded so far that it was frequently remarked and deplored by visiting Englishmen. ... James Flint, in his "Letters from America," [1822] reported that rooster had been substituted for cock (the latter having acquired an indelicate anatomical significance) by 1821 ... A bit later a young man in Judge T. C. Haliburton's "Sam Slick" was telling a maiden that her brother had become a rooster-swain in the Navy.
Hugh Rawson devotes four and a half pages to cock in Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, 1989, a delightful resource.
I quoted the first paragraph of Hugh Rawson's entry. Here are a few sentences from that quote. Bolding is mine for emphasis.
quote:
The sexual overtones are so strong, in fact, that the name of the barnyard foul has almost been lost in the United States, with the blander rooster (one who roosts) being the preferred term in polite society for most of the past two hundred years. The reluctance to say cock for fear of what other people will think one is thinking extends to additional words that incorporate the same nasty sound. Thus, no one today has any hesitancy about mentioning apricots, haystacks, and weather vanes, which have replaced words that our nice-nelly ancestors felt nervous about, i.e., apricox, haycocks, and weathercocks.
These are typical of the changes that took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as proto-Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic began sanitizing the English language.
Later on, he quotes Sir James Murray
quote:
As the magisterial editor of the OED, Sir James Murray, said in 1893 when he came to his entry on cock: 'The current name amoung the people, but, pudoris causa, not permissible in polite society or literature; in scientific language the Latin is used.'
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