ANSWERS: 2
  • This from Brewer's Dictionary of Fable and Phrase - Centennary Edition, "To make horns at. To thrust out the fist with the first and fourth fingers extended, the others doubled in. An ancient gesture of insult to a person implying that he is a cuckhold." A cuckhold being a man who's wife is cheating on him. To be cheated on is to be cuckholded. More properly it means a man who is raising another man's child/ren unawares. But commonly it just means cheated on. I was getting a haircut from a Peruvian woman one day - I promise this is relevant - and as always when I get a haircut I pointed out the birthmarks on the top of my head (one on the left, one on the right, where hair has never grown). I made a joke of it, "Yeah, that's where the horns used to be." She just looked shocked and uncomfortable, so I said something like, "You know like I was a devil child." She laughed and said, "In my country when a woman has cheated on her man we say that "she put horns on him" For more info on origin of cuckhold http://www.word-detective.com/122002.html#cuckhold Hope this helps. Bliss
  • [Middle English cokewald, from Anglo-Norman *cucuald, from cucu, the cuckoo, from Vulgar Latin *cuccÅ«lus, from Latin cucÅ«lus.] WORD HISTORY - The allusion to the cuckoo on which the word cuckold is based may not be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the nesting habits of certain varieties of this bird. The female of some Old World cuckoos lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving them to be cared for by the resident nesters. This parasitic tendency has given the female bird a figurative reputation for unfaithfulness as well. Hence in Old French we find the word cucuault, composed of cocu, “cuckoo, cuckold,” and the pejorative suffix –ald and used to designate a husband whose wife has wandered afield like the female cuckoo. An earlier assumed form of the Old French word was borrowed into Middle English by way of Anglo-Norman. Middle English cokewold, the ancestor of Modern English cuckold, is first recorded in a work written around 1250. A man whose wife is unfaithful; the husband of an adulteress. It is explained that the word alludes to the habit of the female cuckold, which lays her eggs in the nests of other birds to be hatched by them. To make a cuckold of a man is to seduce his wife. 166 S.W. 770. "Cuckold" is derived from the Old French for the Cuckoo bird, "Cocu" with the pejorative suffix -ald. The earliest written use of the Middle English derivation, “cokewold” occurs in 1250. The females of certain varieties of Cuckoo lay their eggs in other bird’s nests, freeing themselves from the need to nurture the eggs to hatching. In medieval Europe, the law, custom, and the church all defined married women as a category of property held by their husbands. Although Christian marriage vows strictly enjoined sexual exclusivity in a marriage for both partners, custom and doctrine rarely enforced it on the husband. A nuance of the word often overlooked in contemporary usage is that it refers to a man who, like the bird warming the cuckoo’s eggs, is unaware of his victimization. A man who knows and acquiesced, in his wife’s taking of another lover was called a “wittol,” itself a derivation from the Middle English for “willing (as in knowing) cuckold.” Cuckolds have sometimes been written as "wearing the horns of a cuckold" or just "wearing the horns". This refers to a tradition claiming that in villages of unknown European location, the community would gather to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. According to this legend, a parade was held in which the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether this did actually happen or not is irrelevant to the phrase, which survived. Cuckolds are also sometimes portrayed as having horns (which look like devil horns), but this is actually a crescent moon set behind the head. Since the moon waxes and wanes, it was held as a symbol of the changeability of love, and especially the fickleness of women, so a cuckold had the moon hanging over his head. The French equivalent of "wearing horns" is "porter des cornes" and is used by Molière to describe someone whose husband has been unfaithful. Molière's L'École des femmes (1662) is the story of a man who mocks cuckolds and becomes one at the end. In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c.1372-77), the Miller's Tale is a story that humorously examines the life of a cuckold. http://www.answers.com/topic/cuckold "Cuckold" is, as the Oxford English Dictionary delicately puts it, "a derisive name for the husband of an unfaithful wife," and can also be used as a verb meaning "to dishonor a husband by committing adultery." Although the shame and scandal attached to such a situation are purely human conceits, we named it, true to form, by scrounging around for an animal metaphor, in this case the innocent cuckoo. A cuckoo is a small European bird known (and named) for its charming "coo-coo-coo" call. The cuckoo is also notable for the female cuckoo's habit of laying her eggs in other birds' nests. It was this odd practice that apparently reminded the French back in the 15th century of the behavior of certain human females. Incidentally, "adultery," although usually committed by persons beyond the age of majority, has nothing to do with the word "adult." "Adult" comes from the Latin "adultus," past participle of the verb "adolescere," meaning "to grow up" and also the source of "adolescence." "Adultery," however, comes from the Latin "adulterare," meaning "to corrupt, to spoil or to make foul," the theory being that horsing around with someone who is not your lawfully wedded spouse spoils or ruins the marriage. (The old joke "Of course we're married, just not to each other" describes a situation technically known as "double adultery.") Although folks who engage in this sort of thing are said to "commit adultery," the more logical verb form "adulterate" (which did mean "to practice adultery" until the 19th century) is now restricted to meaning "to corrupt or spoil" something, often food, usually by diluting it with an inferior ingredient. http://www.word-detective.com/122002.html#cuckhold

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