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So I’m writing my historical novel, minding my own business, when some sort of semantic bug bites me and sends me off on a language tangent. Does this ever happen to you? Last week, I was describing the building of a gristmill on a tributary of the Hudson River around 1700. Given the rough terrain at the time and the need to haul a lot of heavy stuff around, I thought the mill builders might have donkeys handy, rather than horses. This supposition occasioned a bunch of research into when certain hoofed animals arrived in the Americas (not long after Columbus); what sort of resistance donkeys might have to cold or wet conditions (depends on the donkey, and has to do with the fur, or hair); and what sort of work they were used for (hauling stuff to build a mill didn’t seem out of the question). But the word nagged at me. Donkey. Just didn’t sound like early 18th century. Sure enough, no one’s saying donkey until 1785. Why not?
(You can see already how far I’m drifting.)
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Duchess of Somerset, 1710
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Countess of Buckinghamshire, 1790
Turns out that ass is the universal term in English up to this point. Just check your Shakespeare. Then pronunciation changed a bit—pronunciation is always changing, especially among the nonliterate—and the word arse began to sound a lot like ass. The late 18th century saw a certain swing toward modesty; women’s dresses revealed a great deal more breast in 1720 than in 1790. As the word for a common beast of burden began to sound like the word for buttocks—that is, it degenerated—other words stepped in. Burro was one, from the Spanish. Donkey appeared around 1785, derived from an origin lost in the mists of time — perhaps from its dun-colored coat, perhaps for its donlike qualities (?), perhaps for the name Duncan (??).
I loved learning this little etymological tidbit and promptly referred to the long-eared hoofers working my mill as asses. But I discovered a couple of other amusing degenerations along the way. One I had known about but not really attended to: rooster in place of cock. Here, the story goes like this: The male of the fowl was originally the roosting cock, or cock, and no one had a problem with it until, in the 17th century, penises began to be called cocks. Why this latter use? No one’s sure. OED connects this meaning to the “technical” use of the word as “a spout or short pipe serving as a channel,” but I wonder if it’s not also connected to the more dominant sense of cock as “one who arouses slumberers” or “leader.” In either case, unlike arse, which underwent a change in pronunciation, cock took on its body-part meaning rather late; and once again, the late 18th century — chiefly in the Puritan United States — ushered in the less titillating rooster to mean the bird.
Then we come to Coney Island. (I told you I would stray a long way from that gristmill.) The Dutch named the place after its large population of rabbits, called konijn. Simple enough. But the English, too, referred to the little mammals as coneys (the Latin name is Oryctolagus cuniculus), and for several centuries called only the babies rabbits, after the Old French rabotte. How we changed from calling the adult critters coneys to calling them rabbits, beginning (like the change from ass to donkey) in the late 18th century, seems obscure until you read that back in the day, rather than pronouncing the first syllable of coney with a long o, the word used to rhyme with honey. In fact, per the OED, “The usual current pronunciation with long ō … seems to have become established during the course of the 19th cent., and may in part be a spelling pronunciation reflecting the rarity of the word in general use in standard English at this date … reinforced by the desire to avoid association with c—.” In other words, we not only started using rabbit to refer to adults as well as young ’uns; we also changed our pronunciation of the older term to avoid any salacious misinterpretation. Was Coney Island ever pronounced so as to rhyme with Honey Island? Of this, I could find no instance, but given its history (a remarkable art exhibit on the history of Coney Island originated here in Hartford and is now at the Brooklyn Museum), it wouldn’t surprise me.
Degeneration as a source of change isn’t unique to these three terms, of course. What others have you found? Tell us the story — in printable language, of course. Meanwhile, I need to get back to that gristmill.