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
Animal epithet strong, unfailingly loyal, organised, and self-regulating: just the sort of world that the hero Aeneas would like to create. But, Campbell argues, the simile also suggests that Carthage's civilisation is fragile and insignificant, and could readily be destroyed. Animal epithets may be pejorative, indeed in some cultures highly offensive. Epithets are sometimes used in political campaigns; in 1890, the trades unionist Chummy Fleming marched with a group of unemployed people through the streets of Melbourne, displaying a banner with the message "Feed on our flesh and blood you capitalist hyenas: it is your funeral feast". On the other side of