Cox’s codpiece
Attorney general Geoffrey Cox returned from Brussels without even a ‘codpiece’, the name used by some Tories for the concession on the backstop which he was hoping to win from the EU.
— Why is a codpiece called by that name? The expression is traced by the Oxford English Dictionary to the year 1460, a pivotal year in the Wars of the Roses, when the Battles of Northampton and Wakefield were fought
— It has survived in spite of the fact that the word ‘cod’, to indicate scrotum, has since fallen into disuse.
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