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
What Is This Thing Called Love? (short story) with aliens and sex. According to Asimov the article was mostly based on "Marvel" since its contents had been the raciest. Cele Goldsmith Lalli, editor of "Amazing Stories", requested a satire of the "Playboy" article. Asimov set out to write a story telling how a sex-interested alien and humans might "really" interact. The story appeared in the March 1961 issue of "Amazing" as "Playboy and the Slime God", but when Asimov included it in his 1969 collection "Nightfall and Other Stories" he retitled it "What Is This Thing Called Love?" Goldsmith Lalli rewrote the story's last three paragraphs, a change