How did the word “dick” evolve to mean penis?
Answered earlier in other threads.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=16130
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=56535
Thanks for the research. Sorry I did not check the archives first before the post.
There’s another word that means this that I’m sure is of German origin, meaning a “thing.” This is a “ding.” Most guys usually know that a ding is a penis and it was used a lot more commonly in my pre-teen years and was the first euphemism allowed in music in the famous song by Chuck Berry. This takes care of the first two letters. Then there is its shape, like some kind of a sharp object or penetrating weapon that can “prick” something or someone thereby getting the name a “prick.” Words over the years combine, reseparate, and metamorphose into others and this is probably what happened with “dick.” It’s the same thing that happened with “scam.” Someone trying to rip someone off has a scheme to do something that’s going to steal money or resources from someone else. This a “scheme” to perpetrate a “sham” on someone. Thereby once again the word.
On the same subject;
There were some guys I served with in the navy (from the south, I think) who insisted that a “cock” is part of the female anatomy.
Well, that ain’t what I learned. Imagine my surprise when I was invited to “go out and get some cock”.
Anyone know how these charming, but opposite-meaning nicknames came to be?
Peace,
mangeorge
dopetalker You’re serious, aren’t you? I’m curious where you got your info.
This http://www.wordwizard.com/askww/foundaskww.asp?num=1888 is all I could find on this important topic that is near and dear to my hand errrrrr heart 
mangeorge: The onliest time I ever heard tell of this dialectal usage of cock to mean pudenda muliebria was in a bawdy book, Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales by Vance Randolph. I read this when I was a freshman in college, newly arrived in St. Louis. One of the stories was about a guy who visited a new town but couldn’t get laid. So he went into a men’s room and wrote on the wall:
Some come here to sit and think
Others come to shit and stink
But I come here to pull my pud
'Cause the cock in this town ain’t no damn good.
I read this and went “Huh???”
Now I get it. :rolleyes:
Lighter cites cock meaning vulva, or vagina as Southern and Black English. In print from 1867.
There is a cite from 1892: “It is significant that the labia minora are still termed “cockles” in vulgar parlance.” This was in reference to English rhymes. Trying to link it to earlier cites in England about shellfish and cockles, abbreviated as cock.
Hey, if modern American men can joke about “clams” why can’t cockles be the origin?
SAMCLEM-it’s not so much about where I got my information but about what simply is. Words do, in fact, meld, gain and lose endings, get combined over the years because of laziness or because a people begin saying two or three words so fast they become one (like “breakfast”) and have their vowels get changed for another, at least verbally, throughout any calendrical and/or geographic progression-like the word tomato. Look in Cecil’s book “The Straight Dope” on page 156 (or 56, I’m not sure) and you’ll see in his article about penis enlargement both the aforementioned terms and then look at the word for the female sex organ (a cunt) and tell me how you’d think it came into existence. Besides, what’s your explanation of the dick/penis parallel?
One last thing is that to imply one word by another that phonetically and annotatively present difficult barriers to the interpretability of that word as the male sex organ requires quite a jump. One immediately grasps the incident of the rapid creation of several successive euphemisms after the original clinical nomenclature of the organ, like “peenie,” “peter,” “peepee,” “peeer,” etc. but a person didn’t just blithely decide ‘I think I’ll take that word and call it a word that’s already someone’s name and that’s totally off the wall and hope it’ll spread.’ It’s like me deciding tomorrow to start calling the female sex organ a “Martha.”
“Martha” and “Johnson”. Cool.
Peace,
mangeorge
Damn. I have the exact same book and I thought the exact same thing when I read the exact same poem.
Now, get over here and prove you aren’t me!
If I were a man named Richard at the time mentioned above and were told that someone was suddenly going to start making my name mean a penis, I’d find him and punch him right in the face. I wouldn’t even allow this to happen and I’m sure at that time people who used it were assaulted violently. So I can’t understand the creation of this synonym without phonetic and combinatory occurrences coming into play.