What Is The Origin Of (242)?…
Cockney
Tradition has it that a cockney is, as Nathan Bailey defined it in his Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1731, someone “born and bred in the City of London or within the sound of Bow Bell; also a Foundling Child born in the City”. In 1851 the bells, the sound of which reputedly persuaded Dick Whittington to abandon his plans to leave London, could be heard as far south as Southwark and across north and east London. These days, they can only be heard in the City and Shoreditch and as there is no maternity ward within earshot, cockneys are a dying breed. The term, though, is still in use, often accompanied by an alliterative adjective like cheerful, as an alternative term for a Londoner. Where did it come from?
Our story starts with Geoffrey Chaucer and The Reeve’s Tale. Oswald, the eponymous reeve, laments, “and when this jape is tald another day,/ I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay”. Used in this context, poor Oswald had been the victim of a prank, it had the sense of a weakling or someone who was easily taken in. A century later an English-Latin dictionary, Promptorium parvolorum sive clericorum from 1440, defined cockney (or kokeney) as “little darling, pet, or poppet; and these two words are insincere, and said derisively; pampered child”. To be described as a cockney was not a string to your bow in those days.
The poet and agriculturalist, Thomas Tusser, also provides some invaluable assistance in tracing the development of this word. In his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry together with a Book of Huswifery, dating from around 1561, he observed, somewhat drily, “some cockneys with cocking, are made very fools/ fit neither for ‘prentice, for plough, nor for schools”. To cock was to spoil or pamper, a temptation many a parent falls into with their little darlings, and probably came into the English language from the French verb coqueliner. Our old friend, Randle Cotgrave, defined the phrase coqueliner vn enfant in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, published in 1611, as “to dandle, cocker, fedle, pamper, make a wanton of, a child”.
Alternatively, it could come from the old French word coquiné. The Century Dictionary from 1904 noted that it was used variously to describe a “a vagabond who hangs around the kitchen or a child brought up in the kitchen, or a child fed in a kitchen, a pampered child”. Either way we get back to the concept of a spoilt brat.
Cotgrave, though, throws a bit of a curve ball into our considerations by defining coquine as “a beggar woman; also a cockney, simperdedockit (a wonderful word denoting a coquette), nice thing”. And Arthur and Sebastian Evans use cockney in the sense of a dainty, affected woman in their Leicestershire Words, Phrases, and Proverbs of 1881; “shay’s a cockney little thing, shay woon’t ate no fat”.
In trying to make sense of all of this, I think what we are seeing is a country town divide. Those living in cities are so enervated in comparison with the good old English yeoman stock growing up in the countryside that they are positively namby pamby. That this may be the case is suggested by the philologist, Hensleigh Wedgwood, in his Dictionary of English Etymology from 1859. In the pages of this tome he opined that “the original meaning of cockney is a child too tenderly or delicately nurtured, one kept in the house and not hardened by out-of-doors life; hence applied to citizens, as opposed to the hardier inhabitants of the country, and in modern times confined to the citizens of London”.
That being the case, it is curious that these days Londoners take the description as a badge of honour, proof positive, if any were needed, that our language evolves in both form and meaning.
