Rodney Carmichael's early high school years were awkward. Like many young men, he wasn't sure how to talk to girls.

This was less of a problem for his stepbrother. Although a grade younger, he was bigger and had already become something of a junior high lothario. In fact, he had so many girls' numbers, he didn't know what to do with them all. Some he'd pass to Carmichael, who did what he could to heat things up over the phone.

And that's what got Carmichael into a conversation so awkward, he still remembers it a quarter-century later. (Now 40, he's the staff culture writer at Atlanta's Creative Loafing newspaper.)

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He'd never met the girl in person but recalls that his stepbrother promised she was cute. Even better, she'd seen Carmichael from afar and thought the same thing about him. So their phone call slowly meandered from the getting-to-know-you phase to clumsy high school attempts at flirtation.

Then she asked the question that stopped him in his tracks.

"Do you eat cock?"

Carmichael was confused. To the young black man, everything to that point had suggested a typical teenage heterosexual courtship — but the question threw him for a loop. "I didn't know if she was talking about mine or hers," he remembers. "It was kind of nerve-racking."

His confusion was understandable. He didn't use the word "cock" much himself, but when he heard it used by white folks in the media (HBO movies, old issues of Playboy), it was slang for penis.

When it was used by some of his favorite rappers, however, it meant something else entirely. Take Miami rap act 2 Live Crew. The group — obsessed equally with bass and the female anatomy, and most famous for the hit "Me So Horny" — also had a song called "H.B.C.," in which they chanted:

Head, booty, and cock

What you like, fellas?

Head, booty, and cock

And 2 Live Crew were far from the only rap act talking that way in the 1980s and '90s. For a genre that was, until recently, quite homophobic, many male rappers — including plenty from the West Coast — spent a lot of time talking about their appreciation for cock. And by "cock," they meant vagina.

"When I bust my nut, I'm raisin' up off the cock," Snoop Dogg raps on his iconic 1993 hit "Gin and Juice." In Ice Cube's 1998 track "We Be Clubbin'," he brags about "hitting hairy cock all night long." Lil' Kim, New York's high priestess of hip-hop, once spoke of the wonders of her own, yes, cock.

Puberty is tough for anyone to navigate. When you're a teen, both the guys and the girls expect you to be conversant in sex, even if you have no idea what you're talking about. Since there was no Urban Dictionary back then, all Carmichael could do was bluff.

So perhaps it's no surprise that his fledgling courtship quickly wound down. Nobody's cock was ever eaten.

But Carmichael definitely wasn't alone in his confusion. There were surely many casualties in an era when hip-hop's sudden popularity forced this odd bit of slang into a head-on collision with the broader culture: For one group of people, "cock" referred to the male genitalia. For another, it referenced the female.

If you explain the etymological flexibility of the word "cock" to a group of Americans, their reactions generally fall into one of two distinct categories: utter disbelief or "yeah, duh" nonchalance.

Young people fall almost exclusively into the first category, while older Southerners and black people land in the second.

In pop culture and on the Internet, the Northern, white definition is almost universal. On the aforementioned Urban Dictionary, it's the most popular of three crowd-sourced meanings — the other two being "rooster" and "George W. Bush."

But if you listen to rap from previous decades, you'll hear it used the other way, and from quite unlikely sources. Like Mac Dre, the Vallejo gangsta rapper. He did five years in prison for robbery, and was murdered nine years ago by AK-47 gunfire on a Kansas City highway.

The case is unsolved, but there was no question about his sexual preference. There shouldn't have been, anyway, as his song "How I Got This Name" explains that since his school days he's been loving the women — he'd fuck a schoolgirl's whole clique, in fact.

Still, rapmusic.com commenters weren't convinced. In a 2009 thread called "Was Mac Dre Gay?" one cited lyrics from that same song, which chronicles his conversion to a gigolo:

I fucked a bitch who could fuck and suck good

And after that cock was nothin' to me

So I flipped the script and stopped fuckin' for free.

Mac Dre's former manager, Stretch, who is based in L.A., tells the Weekly that the rapper's preferences were strictly heterosexual. And the lyrics should be interpreted using the slang of the day: "Cock was nothing to me" meant simply that Mac Dre had more pussy than he could handle; "flipped the script" meant only that he became an unlikely male prostitute, charging women for his services.

Everyone, Stretch continues, used "cock" to mean vagina when he was coming up in Northern California; he first heard it at the dawn of the '90s as a middle schooler, and it didn't strike him as strange. "If you hear things in a certain context, it's normal. Anything a grown person said, you thought it was cool."

Adds a commenter on the rapmusic.com thread: "Only recently — like a couple years ago — did niggas start flippin' it to mean dick. It only means dick to you 'cause that's the only way YOU have ever heard it."