Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Making promises is a risky business. Because our weekly Word for the wise ©, which is snaking its way through the alphabet, has arrived at the letter R, we must live up to last week's pledge to reach for the "rude" words. And seeing that the Chinese regard 2005 as the "Year of the Rooster", we've got something concrete to work on, but as this is also the week of avian 'flu hysteria we must try to kill, ahem, two birds with the one letter, as it were.

rooster is American English for a male chicken. The British English word is cock. The distinction between the two words is that cock is what the animal is, while rooster is derived from the place where the bird lives because a roost is a perch. Figuratively, troubles come "home to roost" and the alpha male "rules the roost". He's the boss, in other words. The symbolic idea is masculinity, while the word itself is a statement of function.

Cock, on the other hand, has always had heavy sexual connotations. Outside North America, the word is the colloquial term for the male organ. Although not obscene anymore, the Oxford Concise Dictionary rates it as "vulgar". Chambers, in fact, regards it as merely "coarse", so times are changing.

With "rooster" and "cock" one is in the fascinating, and sometimes embarrassing intersection between British English and American English. Why is it an insult to call a woman a "cow" but acceptable to refer to her a "filly" in different strata of British society? In "Mother Tongue", Bill Bryson explores this minefield to great effect. He cites the expression "keep your pecker up", which is crude in America but harmless in Britain, whereas "fanny" in the US is an innocent synonym for a woman's buttocks but the mention of it would cause embarrassed silence over a British breakfast where it is regarded as a synonym for what a shy patient of a doctor friend of ours memorably called her "front bottom".

Next week, we're at "S". Candidates range from "salt" and "synergy".