Meaning of – A Cock and Bull Story
Meaning
Stony Stratford (‘the jewel of Milton Keynes’), Buckinghamshire, England. Visitors to Milton Keynes might feel the bar for ‘jewel’ status is set rather low in that region, although Stony Stratford is indeed a rather pleasant town.
Coaches between London and Birmingham changed horses in the town at two of the main coaching inns – the Cock and the Bull. The banter of the rival groups of travellers, from England’s two largest cities, resulted in exaggerated and fanciful stories. The story is plausible but there’s no real evidence to support it, although the two hostelries did, and still do, exist.
Don’t mentioned this in Stony Stratford if you want to get out alive, but it’s more likely that the phrase comes from old folk tales that featured magical animals. The French term “coq-a-l’ane” has the same meaning. This was later taken up in Scots as “cockalayne”, again with the same meaning.
The first citation in English is from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of melancholy.
“Some mens whole delight is to talk of a Cock and Bull over a pot.”
This lends support to the view that the stories were about cocks and bulls, i.e., fanciful tales, rather than stories told in the Cock or the Bull. The early date doesn’t rule out the coaching inn story though, as they were both in business prior to 1651.
There doesn’t seem to be a direct link from ‘cock and bull’ to ‘bull’ (or bullshit), meaning rubbish or nonsense, which is a 20th US term. Bull is associated Stony Stratford (‘the jewel of Milton Keynes’), Buckinghamshire, England. Visitors to Milton Keynes might feel the bar for ‘jewel’ status is set rather low in that region, although Stony Stratford is indeed a rather pleasant town.
Coaches between London and Birmingham changed horses in the town at two of the main coaching inns – the Cock and the Bull. The banter of the rival groups of travellers, from England’s two largest cities, resulted in exaggerated and fanciful stories. The story is plausible but there’s no real evidence to support it, although the two hostelries did, and still do, exist.
Don’t mentioned this in Stony Stratford if you want to get out alive, but it’s more likely that the phrase comes from old folk tales that featured magical animals. The French term “coq-a-l’ane” has the same meaning. This was later taken up in Scots as “cockalayne”, again with the same meaning.
The first citation in English is from Robert Burton’s The anatomy of melancholy, 1621:
“Some men’s whole delight is to talk of a Cock and Bull over a pot.”
This lends support to the view that the stories were about cocks and bulls, i.e., fanciful tales, rather than stories told in the Cock or the Bull. The early date doesn’t rule out the coaching inn story though, as they were both in business prior to 1651.
There doesn’t seem to be a direct link from ‘cock and bull’ to ‘bull’ (or bullshit), meaning rubbish or nonsense, which is a 20th US term. Bull is associated with made up stories from around the date of the earliest ‘cock and bull’ citation though, as in this quotation from J. Taylor, 1630:
“Wit and Mirth… Made vp, and fashioned into Clinches, Bulls, Quirkes, Yerkes, Quips, and Ierkes.” A countenance more in sorrow than in anger
