The world of romance fiction was flushed this week as it turned out that the word “cocky” had been trademarked. Faleena Hopkins, whose oeuvre includes Cocky Cowboy, Cocky Biker, and Cocky Soldier, wrote to rivals demanding that they retitle their own novels containing the word “cocky”. The genre guild, Romance Writers of America, is consulting its lawyers. Meanwhile, is such use of “cocky” just a silly double entendre?

A cock, of course, is a male hen, as well as a night watchman, part of a gun, the gnomon of a sundial, or “a spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through”, according to the OED, which gently suggests that last sense as giving rise to the word’s common use for the male member. “Oh man what art thou? when thy cock is up?” asks a character in Nathan Field’s 1618 comedy Amends for Ladies.

But the adjective “cocky” had already been first used to mean “lecherous” 69 years previously; it only began to mean vain or conceited (strutting like a cock) in the late 18th century. “Cocky”, then, does originally have sexual implications, and so is a perfectly respectable description of Hopkins’s cast of cock-toting Casanovas.