Welcome to the Year of the Cock

Please note that this site endeavors to use accurate, no-nonsense English.

You may see many references to the Year of the Rooster. This is wrong usage. It derives from puritanical minds which cannot accommodate the fact that cock in English, has long had a secondary meaning, clearly derived from the first, referring to the male sexual organ.

A cock is a male fowl. A hen is a female. A cockerel is a young cock. A rooster is a type of cock – a roosting cock – placed with hens to encourage them to lay eggs. A roost is a perch on which the fowls sit (and to which chickens come home).

Shakespeare used cock as sexual innuendo, for example in Henry V, referring to a soldier: “Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow.”

Cock in its correct meaning is also the basis of other well-known English words and phrases such as cock of the walk, cock-a-hoop and cocksure. One of the key quotes in the best-known English version of the Christian Bible is: “Before the cock crows you will deny me thrice”.

The refusal to use cock in its correct manner leads to absurd tautologies. For example some dictionaries define a cockfight as a “fight between two roosters”!

Cockfighting is deeply engrained in Southeast Asian cultural traditions, most publicly in the Philippines and Bali, but throughout the archipelago and Malay states. So it would be particularly wrong to subject our readers to euphemisms.

At Asiasentinel we call a spade a spade and a cock a cock.

So Happy Year of the Cock