Hacker News Reader

Comment by paleotrope | Hacker News Reader

Which is funny because coney used to be pronounced more like cunny and was deliberately pronounced coney to get away from the vulgar associations.

View on HN

My 2c as a catalan speaker. Apparently cunt is related to the latin "cunnus" (wedge). We also have a vulgar word related to cunnus for vagina, "cony". Its use is not as offensive as cunt, but it is up there with "puta" (whore) as the worst things you could say to a woman. However "cony" is also used in a sexual context: "Et vull menjar el cony" could be translated to "I want to eat your pussy".

Of course we have other obscene words for vagina. One of them is "conill" (rabbit), which is apparently related to "cunniculus" (burrow). The analogy between the action of the animal when hiding and the sexual act seems clear, but however this one is almost exclusively used in descriptive contexts: "L'hi he vist el conill", "I've seen her pussy".

"Conill" is also used more innocently. A young girl (~4yo) who is playing and running around naked could be affectionately called by female relatives "conillet". "Ai el conillet!" as in "oh, the little rabbit!". The goal here, I believe, seems to be not really shaming her to get dressed, but to make her aware that she is naked.

The animal analogy (?) would be similar to that of beaver, I suppose. But of course no mother would call her naked girl little beaver.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it fascinating how languages converge and diverge, and how we find hilarious and imaginative ways to describe the world around us.

Help out a non English speaker if you can. What vulgar associations ?

EDIT: Thanks, all who responded. I wouldn't have made the connection although I am quite familiar with the 'vulgar' word in question. The phonetic similarity sounds farfetched to me, one ends with a hard consonant, the other with a vowel sound.

Sounds like "cunny" = "cunt".

Responding to your edit:

> EDIT: Thanks, all who responded. I wouldn't have made the connection although I am quite familiar with the 'vulgar' word in question. The phonetic similarity sounds farfetched to me, one ends with a hard consonant, the other with a vowel sound.

It's not that "coney" sounds like "cunt". It doesn't. It's that it sounds like "cunny", which is a diminutive form of "cunt". Just like "Annie" is a diminutive form of "Anne", or "kitty" is a diminutive form of "cat".

I thought it is the adjective form, but diminutive sounds also ok.

The adjective non-diminutive would retain the t

Oh I wasn't comparing coney and cunt. To me even cunny and cunt seems quite far apart, admittedly not familiar with the diminutive or adjective form. Thanks all for the education in the colorful English vernacular (I mean that with sincerity, I can well imagine getting into a tough spot by dropping the word 'coney')

Female genitalia, along the lines of Shakespeare's "Country matters".

Once I realised this, Blur’s ”Country House” took on a whole new meaning …

There's an underground Australian Northern Territory campaign which was rather amusing:

CU in the [state initials].

(Absolutely no worse than the FCUK clothing label, which I just find annoyingly lame - at least it was funny.)

> coney used to be pronounced more like cunny

That's still the only pronunciation I know. Rhymes with, and orthographically identical to, "money". (And "honey".)

and bunny!

Interesting maybe that Coinín (sp?) is rabbit in modern Irish/Gaeilge and is pronounced in the former manner. Presumably it has some indo European roots, that didn’t spread into common English usage.

Rabbits were introduced to Ireland, so the word for them was probably borrowed from English or French.

Specifically not English I would have thought …

Yeah, it was borrowed from Anglo-Norman.

Which is about as close to modern English as modern Irish is.

Yep. In fact, depending on which classification scheme of the Indo-European languages you follow, it could be argued it's closer to Irish than it is to English (Italo-Celtic branching). But I was just agreeing that it did come from, essentially, a dialect of French.

I thought it was still pronounced that way, which may account for certain odd looks directed at me.

"This is the Q train for Coney Island - Stillwell. Thanks for asking."

The other pronunciation diversion I think of is how "teat" is "tit" but is now pronounced "teet".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com