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 Rock Coney Rock Coney Rock is a 600 foot tall, 1,000 foot long, glacially formed granite and gneiss ridge in Storrs, Connecticut, part of the town of Mansfield. It is part of the 200-acre Coney Rock Preserve owned partly by the Town and partly by Joshua's Trust that includes the remains of an old farm, a marsh, a hemlock grove, a hornbeam stand, a birch grove, and glacial erratics, as well as five miles of white and yellow blazed trails. There is a memorial bench at the peak. According to local legend, one can see Rhode Island from the ridge. The