I\u2019m not going to link to this phrase that I came across, as it may well just be an editing error and not worth naming and shaming over, but\u2014does this sound right to you?\r\n
\u2026 to cough to the fact that the\u2026<\/blockquote>\r\n
It sounds terrible to me, and I\u2019m not sure exactly what went wrong. I know that cough<\/i> can mean confess, but I\u2019ve never seen it used with as cough to<\/i> something. I think I\u2019ve only seen it in a form something like he\u2019ll cough the minute they get him down to the station<\/i> or if nobody coughs we\u2019ve got no leads<\/i>. On the other hand, Cassell\u2019s Dictionary of Slang<\/cite> has an entry for cough to<\/i>, although (a) it\u2019s late-19th-century, and (2) I infer from the entry that a yegg might cough on<\/i> a fellow criminal, or cough to<\/i> the coppers, and I\u2019m still not feeling that one coughs to crimes or facts.\r\n
I wonder if the writer confused cough<\/i> with cop<\/i> there\u2014I could easily imagine having to cop to the fact that I screwed up. It\u2019s odd that cough<\/i> and cop<\/i> sound so similar and can both mean confess<\/i>, but have different usages. The OED does not appear to have cop to<\/i> in its many and complicated varieties and shades of meaning for cop<\/i>. It\u2019s an Americanism, I believe, but of course the OED includes Americanisms. Cassell\u2019s<\/cite> does have cop to<\/i> as a variant of cop for<\/i>, both meaning confess<\/i>, and also has a variant of cop out<\/i> meaning confess as well, presumably from copping a plea\u2014the person cops to (or cops out to) a lesser crime rather than claiming total innocence. Of course, declaring the derivation of slang (or indeed any) term is a mug\u2019s game no matter how you look at it, and with all the various meanings and slang uses of cop<\/i>, it could be anything.\r\n
What do y\u2019all think?\r\n
Thanks,
-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’d gladly cough to being wrong, if I am indeed wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slang"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17494,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493\/revisions\/17494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}