It’s a fine-sounding expletive, but hardly heard on anybody’s lips these days, and with a dated feel. It seems eminently English: think of elderly ex-Indian-Army colonels in retirement in Tunbridge Wells exploding in wrath over some supposed mismanagement of the country’s affairs and writing disgusted letters to The Times about it. And most of the citations for it in the big Oxford English Dictionary are from British sources. But, as the OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1865. The OED is silent on its origin, but most modern dictionaries know well where it comes from: the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community. The first half of the word is closely related to our pap for infants’ soft food; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century. So there’s no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that’s a load of old cock), as that’s a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel
'Here is the cap your worship bespoke'; on which Petruchio began to storm afresh, saying the cap was moulded in a porringer, and that it was no bigger than a cockle or walnut shell, desiring the haberdasher to take it away and make it bigger. Katharine said: 'I will have this; all gentlewomen wear such caps as these.' 'When you are gentle,' replied Petruchio, you shall have one too, and not till then.' The meat Katharine had eaten had a little revived her fallen spirits, and she said: 'Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, and speak I will: I am no child, no babe; your betters have endured to hear me say my mind; and if you cannot, you had better stop your ears.' Petruchio would not hear these angry words, for he had happily discovered a better way of managing his wife than keeping up a jangling argument with her; therefore his answer was: 'Why, you say true; it is a paltry cap, and I love you for not liking it.' 'Love me, or love me not,' said Katharine, 'I like the cap, and I will have this cap or none.' 'You say you wish to see the gown,' said Petruchio, still affecting to misunderstand her. The tailor then came forward and showed her a fine gown he had made for her. Petruchio, whose intent was that she should have neither cap nor gown, found as much fault with that. 'O mercy, Heaven!' said he, 'what stuff is here! What, do you call this a sleeve?
As recently as 1999, usability expert Jakob Nielsen was waging war against Flash designers. If you read "Designing Web Usability" (now a bible for site architects) you'd come across page headings like "Splash Screens Must Die" or "Flash is 99% bad." What enraged Nielsen was the tendency for Flash designers to create intriguing, imaginative, interactive experiences, instead of just quick access to information. Flash forward to today, and the tables are turning. The spread of broadband, the ubiquity of the Flash plug-in, and recent developments in Flash itself are generating a new demand for Experience Design: the art of creating interactive environments