Half-cocked

I read in the Daily Telegraph that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the use of the word "cock" on its website in case it causes offence. Posts referring to male birds have had the offending word asterisked out automatically by "the Microsoft software package we [the RSPB] use." This has left ornithologists in a quandary as to what to use for the opposite of a hen. (I naturally searched the RSPB website for "cock" and found only three cases of the word, only one of which referred to a male bird.)

I suggest that if the word "cock" is considered too crude, we replace it by the more innocuous "john thomas". For example, our birdwatchers could make themselves perfectly clear with sentences like "I saw a pair of tits: one john thomas and one hen." Roosters (who of course will now be known as john thomases) will greet the dawn by crowing "john-thomas-a-doodle-do".

This brings me to another subject of popular concern: the use of crudities in names. Fortunately, the name Fanny is less popular than it was, but people persist in shortening Richard to Dick, even on websites which are supposed to be safe for children. Why can't people be polite and shorten Richard to Rick or Ricky? Of course there are a few cases where the name is also a description, in which case we could follow the principle I suggested and say, for example, "John Thomas Cheney".