| 释义 |
▪ I. cockney, n. (a.)|ˈkɒknɪ|
Forms: 4–5 cokenay, cokeney, (also kok-), 5–6 coknay(e, 6 cokney, cocknaye, -naie, 6–7 cockeney, cockny(e, -nie, 7 kockney, 6– cockney.
[ME. coken-ey, -ay, app. = coken of cocks + ey, ay (OE. æᵹ) egg; lit. ‘cocks' egg’: see note after the adj.]
A. n.
†1. An egg: the egg of the common fowl, hen's egg; or perh. one of the small or misshapen eggs occasionally laid by fowls, still popularly called in some parts ‘cocks' eggs’, in Ger. hahneneier. Obs.[1598–1611Florio, Caccherelli, cacklings of hens; also egs (1611 egges), as we say cockanegs. Cf. cock's egg s.v. cock1 23. In Surrey the saying goes, ‘When the cock lays eggs, then the hen lays rashers of bacon’.] 1362Langl. P. Pl. A. vii. 272 And I sigge, bi my soule, I haue no salt Bacon, Ne no Cokeneyes, bi Crist, Colopus to maken [1377 B. vi. 287 kokeney, 1393 C. ix. 309 Nouht a cokeney]. 1562J. Heywood Prov. & Epigr. (1867) 36 Men say He that comth euery daie, shall haue a cocknaie. He that comth now and then, shall haue a fatte hen. But I gat not so muche in comyng seeld when, as a good hens fether or a poore eg-shel. a1600Tourn. Tottenham 227 At that fest were thei seruyd in a rich aray, Euery fyve and fyve had a cokeney.
2.
†a. ‘A child that sucketh long’, ‘a nestle-cock’, ‘a mother's darling’; a cockered child, pet, minion; ‘a child tenderly brought up’; hence, a squeamish or effeminate fellow, ‘a milksop’. Obs.
c1386Chaucer Reeve's T. 288 When this jape is tald another day, I sal be hald a daf, a cokenay [v.r. cokeneye]. c1440Promp. Parv. 86 Coknay [v.r. cokeney]. Ibid. 281 Kokeney, corinutus, coconellus, vel cucunellus (et hec duo nomina sunt ficta, et derisorie dicta); delicius. 1483Cath. Angl. 71 A coknay, ambro, mammotropus. 1531Elyot Gov. i. xviii, I speake nat this in dispraise of the faukons, but of them whiche kepeth them like coknayes. 1532More Confut. Tindale Wks. 549/2 As would make vs wene that some wer goddes wanton cokneis..that whatsoeuer thei doe nothing coulde displease him. 1540R. Hyrde tr. Vives' Instr. Chr. Wom. (1592) C c viij, A common Proverbe to cal those widows cockneys, that be ill brought up children. 1573Tusser Husb. (1878) 183 Some cockneies with cocking are made verie fooles, fit neither for prentise, for plough, nor for schooles. 1580Baret Alv. C 729 A cockney, a childe tenderly brought up, a dearling..A cockney, after Saint Augustin, a childe that sucketh long. 1592Nashe P. Penilesse (1842) 18 A young heyre, or cockney, that is his mothers darling, if hee haue playde the waste⁓good at the Innes of the Court, or about London. 1598Meres Wit's Treasury 59 b, So many brought up with great cockering, as Cockneys bee. 1601Shakes. Twel. N. iv. i. 15. 1607 Dekker Knts. Conjur. E (Croft), Our cockering mothers, who for their labour make us to be called cockneys. 1630J. Taylor Wks. i. 77/1. a 1661 Fuller Worthies, London ii. 196, I meet with a double sense of this word Cockeney, some taking it for, i. One coaks'd or cockered, made a wanton or Nestle-cock of, delicately bred and brought up, so that when grown Men or Women, they can endure no hardship, nor comport with pains taking. a1670Hacket Life Abp. Williams i. 90 He was counted but a Cockney that stood in awe of his rulers. 1783Ainsworth Lat. Dict. (Morell) v, Mammothreptus..a child sucking long, or a child wantonly brought up..a cockney.
†b. Hence (apparently), King of Cockneys: a kind of Master of the Revels chosen by the students at Lincoln's Inn on Childermas Day (28 Dec.). Obs.
1518in MS. Black Bk. of Lincolns Inn III. 87 a (9 Feb. 10 Hen. VIII), Item that the kynge of cockneys should childermas day sytt and have due service..and that he and his marechall butler and constable marechall have their lawfull and honeste commandements..and that the said kynge of cockneys ne none of his officers medyll neyther in the buttry nor in the stuard of crstmas is office. (See Dugdale Orig. Jurid. 264 ‘Grand Christmasses at Innes of Court’.)
†c. The name of this mock king is perhaps referred to in the saw recorded by Harrison as popularly current in the 16th c., and reputed to be applied contemptuously to Henry III.
a1577Harrison England ii. xiv. (1877) i. 266 As for those tales that go of..the brag of..[Hugh Bigot] that said in contempt of king Henrie the third..‘If I were in my castell of Bungeie, Vpon the water of Waueneie, I wold not set a button by the king of Cockneie’, I repute them but as toies. [Hence taken, more or less correctly, by Camden (Britannia ed. 2, not in 1), Fuller, Ray, etc. Fuller uncritically took the words as contemporary with Hugh Bigot, whom he further placed in the reign of Henry II. Later writers have, with as little ground, assumed Cockneie here to mean London, or the land of Cockaigne.]
†d. Sometimes applied to a squeamish, over-nice, wanton, or affected woman. Obs. (Cf. 1598 attrib. in 5.)
1605Shakes. Lear ii. iv. 123 Cry to it Nunckle, as the Cockney did to the Eeles, when she put 'em i'th' Paste aliue, she knapt 'em o'th' coxcombs with a sticke, and cryed downe wantons, downe. 1611Cotgr., Coquine, a begger woman; also a cokney, simperdecockit, nice thing.
e. A young snapper, the fish Chrysophrys guttulatus. Austral.
[1882J. E. Tenison-Woods Fish of N.S.W. 41 Juveniles rank the smallest of the fry, not over an inch or two in length, as the cock-schnapper.] 1906D. G. Stead Fishes of Australia 126 Up to about 4 or 5 inches in length, the young fry of the Snapper, which are then characterised by the possession of dark vertical bars on the body, are very often known as ‘Cockneys’. 1951T. C. Roughley Fish & Fisheries Australia 77 Various names are given to the snapper during the course of its growth. The youngest stages are known as ‘cockneys’.
†3. A derisive appellation for a townsman, as the type of effeminacy, in contrast to the hardier inhabitants of the country. Obs.
[1521Whitinton Vulg. 39 This cokneys and tytyllynges..[delicati pueri] may abide no sorrow when they come to age..In this great cytees as London, York, Perusy and such..the children be so nycely and wantonly brought up..that comonly they can little good. ]1594Plat Jewell Ho. iii. Chem. Conclus. 11 The Country people will go neare to rob all Cocknies of their breakfasts. c1600Day Begg. Bednell Gr. v. (1881) 108, I think you be sib to one of the London Cockneys that ask't whether Haycocks were better meat broyl'd or rosted. 1604T. Wright Pass. Pref., Sundry of our rurall gentlemen are as well acquainted with the civill dealing, conversing, and practise of citties, as many Kockneis with the manuring of lands, and affayres of the countrey. c1690B. E. Dict. Cant. Crew, Cockney..also one ignorant in Country Matters. 1739R. Bull tr. Dedekindus' Grobianus 238 A Cockney once did for a Clown provide. 1826Scott Woodst. xviii, Where cockneys or bumpkins are concerned.
4. spec.
a. One born in the city of London: strictly, (according to Minsheu) ‘one born within the sound of Bow Bells’. Always more or less contemptuous or bantering, and particularly used to connote the characteristics in which the born Londoner is supposed to be inferior to other Englishmen.
1600Rowlands Lett. Hum. Blood iv. 65, I scorne..To let a Bow-bell Cockney put me downe. 1607Dekker Westw. Hoe ii. ii, As Frenchmen loue to be bold, Flemings to be drunke..and Irishmen to be Costermongers, so, Cocknyes (especially Shee-Cocknies) loue not Aqua-vite when 'tis good for them. 1611Cotgr., Guespine, a waspish dame; (as our Cockney of London) a nickname for a woman of Orleans. 1617Minsheu Ductor s.v., A Cockney or Cockny, applied only to one borne within the sound of Bow-bell, that is, within the City of London, which tearme came first out of this tale: That a Cittizens sonne riding with his father..into the Country..asked, when he heard a horse neigh, what the horse did his father answered, the horse doth neigh; riding farther he heard a cocke crow, and said doth the cocke neigh too? and therfore Cockney or Cocknie, by inuersion thus: incock, q. incoctus i. raw or vnripe in Country-mens affaires. 1617Moryson Itin. iii. 53 Londiners, and all within the sound of Bow-bell, are in reproch called Cocknies, and eaters of buttered tostes. 1644Dan O'Neile Let. Mrq. Ormond in Carte Orig. Lett. I. 52 Obliged to quit Oxford at the approach of Essex and Waller with their prodigious number of cocknies. 1654Whitlock Zootomia 221 That Synods Geography was as ridiculous as a Cockneys (to whom all is Barbary beyond Brainford; and Christendome endeth at Greenwitch). 1803S. Pegge Anecd. Eng. Lang. 2 Not being myself a Cockney. 1836Marryat Midsh. Easy xii, He was a cockney by birth, for he had been left at the workhouse of St. Mary Axe. 1848W. E. Forster Diary 16 Apr. in T. W. Reid Life (1888) I. 224 The Times and the Government and all cockneys were so much alarmed. 1850Kingsley Alt. Locke i, I am a cockney among cockneys.
b. One of the ‘Cockney school’: see 6 b.
1826Blackw. Mag. XIX. Pref. 16 The nickname [Cockney] we gave them, has become a regularly established word in our literature. Lord Byron..called them by no other title than the Cockneys. 1831Scott in Blackw. Mag. Feb. 272 Whigs, Cockneys, Revolutionists, he furiously attack would.
c. The dialect or accent of the London cockney or of those from the East End of London generally.
1890A. Tuer Thenks Awf'ully! p. viii, Back-slang, or Costers' Cockney, in which the letters forming leading words are turned hindside before. 1901G. B. Shaw Capt. Brassbound's Conversion 306 Some time in the eighties the late Andrew Tuer called attention in the Pall Mall Gazette to several peculiarities of modern cockney. 1938W. Matthews Cockney Past & Present i. 21 Among the consonantal pronunciations characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cockney there are several that are familiar as the outstanding Cockneyisms in Victorian novels. 1957Encycl. Brit. V. 916/1 The omission of h is not peculiar to cockney. 1979Washington Post 19 July c4 Bryant tells how she had to learn cockney in acting school. 1985Time 30 Dec. 72/3 In the most striking moment, she wheels on her daughter, drops her posh accent and snarls a question in the gutter Cockney she spoke as a girl, revealing a whole lost life in the intonation of a few syllables.
B. as adj. (orig. attrib. use of the n.).
1. Cockered, petted; effeminate; squeamish.
1573Twyne æneid xii. L l j, That same Cocknie Phrygian knight. 1583Stanyhurst æneis i. (Arb.) 39 Thus spake she to cocknye Cupido. Ibid. iv. 106 Yf a cockney dandiprat hopthumb Prittye lad æneas in my court wantoned. 1598Meres Wit's Treasury 276 b, Many Cockney and wanton women are often sicke. 1606R. Clayton in Lismore Papers Ser. ii. (1887) I. 102 Yf he ceased not his Cockney carriage.
2. a. Pertaining to or characteristic of the London Cockney.
1632Brome Northern Lasse Dram. Personæ, Master Widgine, a Cockney-Gentleman. 1659T. Pecke Parnassi Puerp. 60 To boast yourself of Cockney, you think good; Lest som should say, you were of British Bloud. 1776G. Campbell Philos. Rhet. (1801) I. 399 It is an idiom of the Cockney language. 1856Emerson Eng. Traits, Voy. Eng. Wks. II. 13 Men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit. 1861Sat. Rev. 2 Feb. 112/2 The Westminster Review..describes the easy writing and comic language poured forth by popular writers on great subjects, as ‘cockney chatter’. 1876T. Le M. Douse Grimm's L. §54. 127 The Cockney dialect and the polite English dialect are (or were) spoken by different, but overlapping strata.
b. Cockney school: a nickname for a set of 19th cent. writers belonging to London, of whom Leigh Hunt was taken as the representative.
1817Lockhart in Blackw. Mag. Oct. 38 (On the Cockney School of Poetry) If I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of The Cockney School. 1882Mrs. Oliphant Lit. Hist. Eng. II. 225 At a later period Hazlitt joined this literary circle, then Leigh Hunt; and it began to be assailed as the ‘Cockney School’.
3. Comb., as cockney-bred, cockney-like adj., cockney-land.
1621Burton Anat. Mel. i. ii. ii. ii, Overprecise, cockney⁓like, and curious in their observation of meats. 1843Mrs. Carlyle Lett. I. 221 The only religious meeting I ever saw in cockneyland which had not plenty of scoffers. 1884J. Payn Thicker than Water xvi. 127 Who know their own metropolis as well as though they had been cockney-bred.
[The derivation suggested above satisfies the form: ey, ay (ai), are regular ME. forms of egg, riming with the same words (day, etc.) as cokenay itself; coken genitive pl. is as in clerken coueitise, P. Pl. B. iv. 119, and in many similar instances; the use of the gen. plural is as in Ger. hühnerei, fowls' egg, hahnenei cocks' egg. The stress on ay retained in verse to 16th c., and supported by Minsheu's cock neigh, also accords with this composition of the word.
Of sense 1, the meaning appears to be established by the first quot.; the constituents of a collop (q.v.) were precisely bacon and an egg. This meaning also completely explains the quot. from Heywood; that from the Tournament is perhaps (as already suggested by Wright) satirical or jocose. The matter appears to be clinched by the quot. from Florio for cockan-egs. To account for the appellation, we might suppose coken-ay to be originally a child's name for an egg (cf. what is said of coco below); but as cocks' eggs and the equivalent Ger. hahneneier are at the present day applied in popular or dialect speech to small or malformed eggs (formerly imagined to be laid by the cock), it is not improbable that this was originally the specific sense of cokenay. The old notion that such eggs produced a serpent (see cockatrice) is well known; but no trace of this appears in the popular use of cokenay.
The application of either a child's word for an egg, or of the name of a small or mis-shapen egg, as a humorous or derisive appellation for ‘a child sucking long’, a ‘nestle-cock’, a ‘milk sop’, obviously explains itself; and the sense-development from 2 onward is clear and certain. A valuable contribution to the history of these senses is made by H. H. S. Croft, in the Glossary to his ed. (1883) of Elyot's Gouernour.
An apparent parallel is the French word coco ‘a child's name for an egg’, also a term of endearment applied to children, and of derision applied to men: mon petit coco, quel grand coco! Coco, considered by Littré a deriv. of coq, was app. the source of coconellus (dim. of *coco, cocōnem) given in the Promp. Parv., with cucunellus, as med.L. translations of cokenay, and stated to be ‘ficta et derisorie dicta’, ‘derisorie ficta et inventa’. And coconellus, in turn, appears to be the origin of the 16th c. Eng. cocknel, given above, as an exact equivalent of cockney, senses 2, 4. On F. coco was formed the verb coqueliner ‘to dandle, cocker, fedle, pamper, make a [cockney or] wanton of (a child)’, just as dodo a word like Eng. ‘by-by’ or ‘ba-ba’, sung to lull a child to sleep, gave dodeliner to perform this action. It is to be noted also that, from the earliest times, cokenay 2 was constantly associated with the vb. coker cocker, both in use (see quots. in 2), and in L. and Fr. explanations e.g. ‘cokeryn, carifoveo; cokenay, carifotus’, Promp. Parv., ‘I coker je mignotte; I bring up like a cocknaye je mignotte’ Palsgr. If cocker was, as it appears to be, a derivative of cock, this association was natural and obvious.]
Hence various nonce-wds., as ˈcockneian a., pertaining to, or characteristic of, a cockney. cockˈneity, cockney quality. cockneyˈcality, anything characteristic of cockneys, a cockneyism. cockneyˈese, the speech or ‘dialect’ of cockneys. ˈcockneyess, a female cockney. ˈcockneyship, the condition of a cockney (humorously as a title). ˈcockniac a., pertaining to cockneys, cockney.
1839F. A. Kemble Resid. Georgia (1863) 132 There is one privilege which I enjoy here which I think few cockneyesses have ever had experience of. 1842Fraser's Mag. XXVI. 619 Peculiarities, cockneian and congenito-theatrical. 1844Ainsworth's Mag. VI. 206 The number of our pretty cockneyesses. 1882Carlyle in Century Mag. XXIV. 28 Mixed rusticity or cockneity. 1834–5Mrs. Carlyle Early Lett. (Ritchie) 263 Fragments of Haddington, of Comely Bank, of Craigenputtoch interweaved with cockneycalities into a very habitable whole. 1823Blackw. Mag. XIV. 92 Stupid French books translated..into stupid Cockneyeze. 1848Thackeray Van. Fair vi. (1853) 41 Country dances, formed by bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses. 1832J. Wilson in Blackw. Mag. XXXI. 958 To disenchant his cockneyship out of that audacious dream. 1843Fraser's Mag. XXVII. 465 ‘The 'ouse,’ as Mrs. Crump would say..in her simple Cockniac dialect. 1889E. Sampson Tales of Fancy 40 My father was a Cockney, my mother was a Cockneyess, and I am the unfortunate result.
▪ II. † cockney, v. Obs.
[f. cockney n. (sense 2).]
trans. To make a ‘cockney’ or petted child of; to cocker, pamper, pet.
1583Stanyhurst æneis i. (Arb.) 40 But Venus..Too woods Idalian thee child nice cocknyed heauing In seat of her boosom. 1625Bp. Hall Serm. xxix. (R.), The wise justice of the Almighty meant not to cockney us up with meere dainties with a loose indulgence. |
