英语词汇cocksure的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

cocksure. Since the word cocksure first meant secure, safe, and certain—not dogmatic and self-confident, as it does today—it probably didn’t originally have anything to do with the pompous, strutting rooster usually associated with it. But no one is cocksure about cocksure’s origins, which go back al- most five centuries. In its now obsolete sense of lecherous, cocksure is much younger, so that eliminates a likely source and a better story. A real possibility is that the word was just a eu- phemism for God sure!—since cock was often a euphemism for God in oaths. Or it may have first meant the security of God, as in the following quote from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563): “Who so dwelleth under . . . the help of the Lord, shall be cock- sure for evermore.” Shakespeare uses the word as if it derives from the sureness of the cock on the firelock of a gun, a cock that keeps the gun from going off, and the O.E.D. suggests as a source the cock, or tap, on a barrel of whiskey, which secured the liquor inside, preventing its escape. The Welsh word coc, “cog,” has also been nominated—cocksure would thus mean “as sure as cogs fit into one another.” So has the Irish coc, “mani- fest,” and the Old English cock, for “the notch of a bow”—an ar- row would have to be set cocksure to hit its target. No matter which is correct, it’s almost certain that the idea of the strutting aplomb of a barnyard cock and the phallic associations of the word contributed to its later meaning of “pert and cocky.”

词汇	cocksure
词源	cocksure. Since the word cocksure first meant secure, safe, and certain—not dogmatic and self-confident, as it does today—it probably didn’t originally have anything to do with the pompous, strutting rooster usually associated with it. But no one is cocksure about cocksure’s origins, which go back al- most five centuries. In its now obsolete sense of lecherous, cocksure is much younger, so that eliminates a likely source and a better story. A real possibility is that the word was just a eu- phemism for God sure!—since cock was often a euphemism for God in oaths. Or it may have first meant the security of God, as in the following quote from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563): “Who so dwelleth under . . . the help of the Lord, shall be cock- sure for evermore.” Shakespeare uses the word as if it derives from the sureness of the cock on the firelock of a gun, a cock that keeps the gun from going off, and the O.E.D. suggests as a source the cock, or tap, on a barrel of whiskey, which secured the liquor inside, preventing its escape. The Welsh word coc, “cog,” has also been nominated—cocksure would thus mean “as sure as cogs fit into one another.” So has the Irish coc, “mani- fest,” and the Old English cock, for “the notch of a bow”—an ar- row would have to be set cocksure to hit its target. No matter which is correct, it’s almost certain that the idea of the strutting aplomb of a barnyard cock and the phallic associations of the word contributed to its later meaning of “pert and cocky.”
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