Sir, - It would be presumptuous of me to question Kevin Myers's use of his Irishman's Diary column of August 29th for yet another obsessed rant about American feminism. I am not, unfortunately, his editor. I do feel qualified, however, to give him a short lesson in American English, the language which I have spoken all of my verbal life.
Mr Myers ascribes the American use of the word "rooster" - where he would use "cock" - to a culture of "authoritarian linguistic prudishness". A quick glance at a good dictionary reveals that "rooster" derives from the venerable Old English word "hrost", meaning a perch for birds, and not from some free-floating American feminist squeamishness. Could it be that, instead of being prudish, American English has merely retained an archaism where the rest of the Anglophone world has taken its linguistic cues from an updated British model of the language? After all, we were saying "rooster" long before even the suffragettes came on the scene.
Of course, injecting some facts into Mr Myers's article might entirely undermine his groundless, politically motivated and under-researched speculations, and that would make for dull copy.
Incidentally, I have spent a lot of time in Ireland, as both a visitor and a resident, and I can assure you that America has not cornered the market on prudishness, linguistic or otherwise, despite Gaelic proclivities for anatomical descriptors (e.g. piteogach). Furthermore, if Mr. Myers would care to do some field work with living, breathing, speaking Americans, he would be sure to hear the following, all said without embarrassment: cocksure, cock-eyed, cock-and-bull, and cockamamie (which Americans did indeed devise all by themselves). - Yours, etc., John Ihle,
Spruce Street, Philadelphia, USA.