Meaning & Analysis
A descriptive term, using mock-French, for a person (typically a woman) who exhibits a coy, affected, or flirtatious smile and demeanor. It refers to the act of putting on a coquettish air.
Insights
Social Performance and Artifice
Symbolizes the conscious construction of a social persona, particularly in courtship. The 'simper' is not a genuine expression but a calculated performance intended to charm, attract, or manipulate.
Critique of Insincerity
Represents a satirical critique of affectation and insincerity. The phrase is used pejoratively to dismiss the subject's behavior as shallow, counterfeit, and lacking in genuine emotion, as noted in the 1607 quotation describing them as 'counterfeit puppets'.
Deceptive Appearances
The flirtatious air serves as a mask for true intentions. This suggests a deeper commentary on deceptive appearances, where a seemingly harmless or charming facade may conceal strategic or manipulative motives.
Linguistic Satire
The pseudo-French phrasing ("de cocket") satirizes the courtly affectations popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, using language to mock social pretensions and the adoption of foreign manners.
Renaissance Character Trope
This phrase functioned as a literary and social shorthand for a stock character in Renaissance literature—the coquettish, sometimes scheming, woman. Its use by authors like John Skelton and Ben Jonson cemented it as a recognizable trope.
Gendered Social Commentary
The term, almost exclusively applied to women, reveals historical anxieties surrounding female agency and expression in courtship. It frames flirtatious behavior as a form of insincere performance, thereby policing and critiquing it.
Rhetorical Devices
Satirical Epithet
Functions as a concise, judgmental label rather than a full proverb, using a mocking tone to characterize and dismiss a specific type of social behavior.
Archaic Loan Phrase
The use of a mock-French construction ('de cocket') lends an air of fashionable affectation, which ironically serves to underscore the very insincerity the phrase critiques.
Consonance
The repetition of the hard 'c' and 'k' sounds in 'cocket' creates a crisp, memorable, and slightly dismissive sound pattern that enhances its satirical quality.
Transcription
Quotations
In her furred flocket, And gray russet rocket, With symper the cocket.
I saw you dally wyth your symper de cokket.
Vpryght as a candell standeth in a soket, Stoode she that daie, so sympre de coket.
There are another sort of simper-de-cockets, who counterfeit puppets, in speaking so finely that they wil scarce open their mouthes.
Lay by your wimbles, Your boringe for thimbles, Or vsing your nimbles In diuing the pockette And sounding the socketts Of Simper-the-Cocketts.
Explanation
[An affected, coquettish air; a woman characterized by such airs; a flirt.]
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.