It’s also been used by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. And cuckquean Hillary also once had a problem with a certain relative. And Hillary Clinton races toward the middle to give herself a shot on the Dem side.ĭownsides include Jeb's brother, who currently has low approval ratings. Jeb Bush is again being chatted up as presidential material.įlorida, after all, is a go-go state and the governor can take some credit for same. Bullard seems to have been fond of the term, applying it often to Hillary Clinton. It appears multiple times in the blog of journalist George Bullard. It popped up in James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses used to describe the old woman who delivers the milk in the first episode:Ī wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning.īut otherwise cuckquean remained largely unused until the twenty-first century. You make hir a cookqueyn, and consume hir good.Ĭuckquean had a run of about a century, but it faded from use by the mid seventeenth century. Ye shewe all thunkyndnesse ye can deuyse.Īnd where reason and custome (they saie) afoordsĪlwaie to let the loosers haue theyr woords, From John Heywood’s 1546 A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue: At this time, quean also developed a disparaging connotation of a sexually assertive woman or prostitute.Ĭuckquean appears by the middle of sixteenth century. The two pronunciations merged again in the Early Modern period, so we don’t hear the difference today, but the distinction was maintained by spelling the common-woman sense as quean. In Early Middle English, the vowel became more open when queen was used to simply mean a woman, as opposed to the closed vowel when used to refer to the wife of a king. The Old English cwen not only could refer to a noble woman or wife of a king, it could refer to any woman or a wife. It’s a compound of the first syllable of cuckold and a now-archaic spelling of queen. But there is a word for woman who has been cheated upon it is cuckquean. Given the sexual double-standard that has existed since antiquity, this should be no surprise. ![]() It only refers to men whose wives have been unfaithful, never the other way around. You may have noticed that the use of cuckold is rather sexist. If it shall come in question, that to Cockhole him were sinne. Him frownese shall threat, or smiles intreat, and few will iudge, I winne, It shall be thought but ielosie in him, or want of wit. Nay, be it that he should espy false carding, what of it? The noun becomes a verb in the sixteenth century. Oh, God only knows! She cannot resist it, though she makes him a cuckold.) One may abuse her so often, that she will satisfy her own needs. (There is no man who cannot lead his wife astray with such behavior. ![]() In the relevant passage, the owl makes the point that women who are abused or cheated upon by their husbands often turn to other men, justifying their making their husbands cuckolds: The poem survives in two manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.9 and Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part 2. ![]() The earliest appearance of cuckold in English is in the Early Middle English debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, composed c.1275. The French word comes from the Latin cuculus, meaning cuckoo, the bird, and the name is echoic of the bird’s call.Ĭuckold arises from the fact that a cuckoo often lays its eggs in the nest of another bird, a metaphor for siring progeny in another man’s home, and in other languages, the word for a cuckold can apply to both the husband and the male adulterer, although in English it is applied only to the cheated-upon husband. That term is unattested in early years, but the French word appears in 1463 as cucuault, so the older form is assumed to have existed. The English word comes from Old French *cucuald. For most of its life, the word has been an insult, and it still can be, but in kink and fetish circles being a cuckold can be a positive thing.Ĭuckold has cognates in many languages. A cuckold is a husband of an unfaithful wife.
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