Coney-catching Coney-catching Coney-catching is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled "conny"), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief or con man. It was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals." The term was first used in print by
Coney Island Creek Coney Island Creek Coney Island Creek is a long tidal inlet in Brooklyn, New York City. It used to be a long continual strait and a partial mudflat connecting Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay, making Coney Island an actual island, but the eastern half of the creek was filled in by land owners and city construction projects during a period spanning the early to mid in the 20th century. Coney Island Creek extends eastward from Gravesend Bay to Shell Road and separates the west end of Coney Island from the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bath Beach. The west end of