Q: In Confusion (1993), a novel set in the early ’40s and part of her “Cazalet Chronicle,” Elizabeth Jane Howard uses “keep your pecker up” to mean keep your spirits up. “Pecker”? I’ve always thought that was slang for a penis.
A: In colloquial British English, “pecker” has meant courage or fortitude since the mid-19th century, decades before it came to mean penis, chiefly in colloquial American English. Here’s the story.
The noun “pecker” has meant all sorts of things since it first appeared in the late 16th century, when it was a small hoe-like tool used to break up compacted soil.
The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded, is from A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), by the English writer Thomas Hariot:
“The women with short peckers or parers, because they use them sitting, of a foote long and about fiue inches in breadth: doe onely breake the vpper part of the ground to rayse vp the weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of corne stalkes with their rootes.”
The OED says the use of “pecker” for a tool was derived from the avian sense of the verb “peck” (to strike with a beak), a usage that appeared in the 14th century.
Getting back to the expression you ask about, the OED says “pecker” here means “courage, resolution,” and is used “chiefly in to keep one’s pecker up: to remain cheerful or steadfast.”
The earliest example we’ve found is from Portraits of Children of the Mobility (1841), by Percival Leigh and John Leech, anecdotes and illustrations about working-class children in England.
One illustration shows two boys, Tater Sam and Young Spicey, fighting while other boys cheer them on. One bystander shouts, “Tater, keep your pecker up, old chap!”
The first OED citation for “pecker” used in this sense is from a Sept. 15, 1845, letter to The Times, London: “Come, old chap, keep your pecker up.”
The earliest examples we’ve seen for “pecker” used to mean “penis” are cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which labels the usage as “orig. US.”
Green’s quotes “The Joy of the Brave,” a bawdy poem intended to be sung to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The slang dictionary dates it at “c. 1864.”
Here’s an expanded version of the citation: “She gave me to feel that nought would suffice / But stiff sturdy pecker, so proud with desire / To stifle that longing, her fierce amorous fire.”
However, we should add that we’ve been unable to find the original source of that poem. Green’s cites a collection published in Britain in 1917, The Rakish Rhymer, which reprints it with no attribution.
Green’s cites another rhyming example from The Stag Party (1888), an American collection of bawdy songs, toasts, and jokes: “My pecker got hard behind the tree … And I found I had no inclination to pee.”
The OED’s earliest example for “pecker” used to mean “penis” is from Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (1902), by John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley.
In their entry for “pecker,” the authors list various senses, including “1. The penis; and (2) a butcher’s skewer (see quot. 1622, with a pun on both senses of the word).”
The pun is in this comment by “Hircius, a whoremaster,” in The Virgin Martyr (1622), a play by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger:
“Bawdy Priapus, the first schoolmaster that taught butchers to stick PRICKS in flesh, and make it swell, thou know’st, was the only ningle that I cared for under the moon.” (A “ningle” is an old term for a male friend, especially a homosexual.)
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