A foolish or ridiculous person; a scarecrow or worthless object (archaic).
From cock + meg (possibly from the name 'Meg' or a variant of 'midge'), though the exact etymology is unclear. This dialectal or archaic term appears in Early Modern English with unclear origins but was used as a mild insult.
Some old words fall out of use because we forget their original meaning—'cockermeg' is one of these linguistic mysteries where scholars debate whether it comes from a person's name, a dialect word, or a combination of two different root words. It's like English's version of a word fossil.
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