ACCORDING TO COCKER, adv. phr. (colloquial).—According to rule; properly, arithmetically, or correctly done. [From old Cocker, a famous writing master in Charles II.’s time, author of a treatise on arithmetic. Professor de Morgan notes ‘that it became a proverbial representative of arithmetic from Murphy’s farce of The Apprentice (1756), in which the strong point of the old merchant Wingate is his extreme reverence for COCKER and his arithmetic.’] In America a similar locution is according to GUNTER (q.v.). Gunter was a famous arithmetician a century before Cocker, and the American is no doubt the older phrase. The old laws of Rhode Island say, ‘All casks shall be gauged by the rule commonly known as “gauging by Gunter.”’ Among sailors, the standard of appeal is ACCORDING TO JOHN NORIE—the compiler of a popular Navigator’s Manual.
1851. H. MAYHEW, London Labour and the London Poor. ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ Surely, to increase the quantity of labour, while the amount expended in the direct purchase of that labour remains the same, is ACCORDING TO COCKER—to decrease the wages in precisely the same proportion.
1861. T. HUGHES, Tom Brown at Oxford, ch. xxxii., p. 337. Well, so you ought to be, ACCORDING TO COCKER, spending all your time in sick rooms.
1883. G. A. S[ALA], in Illustrated London News, Nov. 24, p. 499, col. 2. The average American may not know what we mean by ACCORDING TO COCKER; while the average Englishman may be unaware of the meaning of ‘according to Gunter.’ They both mean the same thing; implying irreproachable accuracy in computation.
1888. GRANT ALLEN, This Mortal Coil, ch. ii. ACCORDING TO COCKER nought and nought make nothing.
