On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The cocks, it said, were annoying people with their crowing. The news at noon called them not roosters and cocks, but cockerels and fowls.

I wrote here in 2005 about the advent of the ‘Year of the Cockerel’ and suggested that cock would soon be unusable because it put everyone in mind of a rude word for penis.