Origin of the Name
The expression Cock Goblin is older than this Council, older than the 1989 reorganisation, and probably older than any written record of the phenomenon itself. Where it comes from has never been established. We treat it as an inherited field term and not as a description of anything.
The corruption theory (Kauffman–Ritter)
Formalised by Ada Kauffman in a 1936 Berks County folklore index and taken up again by Harold Ritter in 1974. The claim is that "Cock Goblin" is an English approximation of an older Pennsylvania German or Appalachian border term, worn down through oral transmission until neither the sound nor the sense survived.
Ritter turned up six nineteenth-century spellings in private letters and local newspaper columns. No two of them agree closely enough to reconstruct a source form, and at least two were written down decades after the events they describe by people who had heard the story rather than the word.
Kauffman Folklore Cards, box 11, folios 73–81; Ritter Papers, CGRSC-HL-204; Terminology Review 7-B/1998.
The arrangement theory
This is the one that will not go away, and the reader should know before starting it that the present writer has argued against it for eleven years.
The proposal is that the first word is not anatomical or ornithological at all, but an obsolete rural usage: in several regional farm glossaries cock denotes a small stack, heap, or deliberately arranged grouping of things — a haycock being the survival most people have met. On this reading the name attached itself to reports in which objects, or in the contested cases livestock, were found repositioned into compact or geometric arrangements.
Its supporters lean heavily on CG-H044, the 1952 Upper Lehigh report in which seven animals were found before dawn in two unusually even rows, and on later property cases including CG-0473 and CG-0788, the latter being six ceramic lawn animals in a semicircle.
The difficulty is straightforward and has never been answered. Nothing in the record shows the word arriving before those cases rather than being applied to them afterwards by people who already had the word. A term that fits a pattern is not thereby derived from it. Kauffman made this objection in 1936 and it has been restated, unimproved, roughly once a decade since.
Field Lexicon Committee Minutes, 1968; Miller Agricultural Vocabulary Notes, CGRSC-LEX-19; Pattern Review Docket PR-4.
The compositor error
In 1909 the Society secretary Nathaniel Voss claimed the modern name began as a typesetter's alteration of a witness phrase in an 1884 newspaper item, and that although a correction ran two days later, two neighbouring papers had already reprinted the error.
No complete run of the originating paper survives. A clipped reprint in the Voss collection does contain the phrase; the correction has never been found, and the microfilm gap assessment of 2007 concluded it probably never will be. The theory keeps its supporters because it would neatly explain why the term surfaces in widely separated records within a few years of each other in the late 1880s. Neatness is, of course, exactly what should make one suspicious of it.
Voss Scrapbook II, pp. 41–44; Society Correspondence Register, 1909/17; Microfilm Gap Assessment, 2007.
The archive-label theory
A minority hold that there was never one name — that several unrelated local expressions were flattened into a single label by collectors, editors, and early Society officers. Its opponents say it explains our filing rather than anybody's speech, which is fair, and its supporters say that may be all there is to explain.
Why none of this is settled, and cannot be
The dispute has never stayed academic. The Eastern Chapter printed the corruption theory as fact in its 1968 handbook. Delaware Valley put the arrangement theory into its training materials in 1971. In 1986 the National Records Committee tried to ban etymological statements from public bulletins altogether, which went about as well as one would expect.
All of this fed the 1972–1978 split now called the Lexical Schism. The reunification minutes carry an explicit condition: no regional theory may ever be declared the Council's official explanation of the common name. That condition is why this page ends without a conclusion, and it is the correct outcome, whatever the arrangement people tell you.
House rule
Use Cock Goblin as the common name and Gobelinus galliformis as the provisional catalogue tag. Infer nothing about anatomy, origin or classification from either. Both are accidents that stuck.
Standing dispute. This page is maintained by the Terminology Subcommittee, which has three members and no agreement.