It’s all down to birds. The feathered kind. For a start there’s cuckold, a word that comes from Old French cucuault, and thence cucu and both offer the image of the cuckoo, that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. But the real stuff comes with cocks. Indeed, but again the point is natural history rather than (un)natural practices. The great body of terms referring to male sufferers of female infidelity (men, in slangworld, are not unfaithful, merely admirable, not to mention enviably lucky) is linked to a single root: the horn. Horn means penis and in time gives us horny and such stuff, but while the link to the prick – someone else’s prick that is – has doubtless insinuated its way into the etymology of cuckoldry, it is but a by-blow.
As I said: natural history. The term apparently comes from an old German farming practice of grafting the spurs of a castrated cock on the root of the severed comb. These transplants would grow into horns, sometimes several inches long. The German word hahnreh or hahnrei, meaning cuckold, originally meant capon, a castrated cock. Capon itself can mean a cuckold in slang. That said, an alternative, and older theory took the posture of ‘missionary position’ intercourse, in which the man represented a head and the woman’s legs, spread and raised, were his horns; thus the literary publican Ned Ward in ‘The Dancing School’ (1700): ‘I should hate a Husband with horns, were they even of my own grafting’.
Once established, in the mid-15th century, the concept of horns, and the ‘wearing’ thereof, generated a substantial vocabulary. Mr Horner or the knight of Hornsey, or even the unicorn, the hapless, hornified, horn-headed, corniferous, cornuted, capricornified, grafted, (one might know a man by his headmark) hubby, could double Cape Horn, grow horns, have a pain on his forehead, hurt in the head, wear the horns, a forker or the bull’s feather. If he was resigned to his fate he could hang out the broom, echoing the tradition of hanging out a broom to announce that one’s wife was absent and in that manner advertising for a temporary housekeeper. Meanwhile the adulterer, horn-mad with lust (though horn-mad also describes his victim’s jealousy), was a buck, a horn-grower or -maker, or a horner, who did his horn-work and hornified, cornuted, gave horns to or put horns on his mistress’s (herself known as horns-to-sell) mate, aquiescent (as so many 17th century plays featuring rich old Cits, randy younger wives and apprentices keen to offer them the services of their tool bear witness; the specific term was gilt-horn) or otherwise.
And then, well ‘then’ as in the six centuries from the 1100s through 1768, there was Horn Fair.
Daniel Defoe, he of Robinson Crusoe, included it in his A tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727):
‘Charleton, a village famous, or rather infamous for the yearly collected rabble of mad-people, at Horn-Fair; the rudeness of which I cannot but think, is such as ought to be suppressed, and indeed in a civiliz’d well govern’d nation, it may well be said to be unsufferable. The mob indeed at that time take all kinds of liberties, and the women are especially impudent for that day; as if it was a day that justify’d the giving themselves a loose to all manner of indecency and immodesty, without any reproach, or without suffering the censure which such behaviour would deserve at another time.’
Figuratively it meant the state of being a cuckold but Horn Fair was a real occasion, held annually at Charlton, Kent on St. Luke’s day, 18 October. In Christian iconography St. Luke bears the evangelistic sign of the Ox, and thus he ‘wears the horns’. Well, it seemed funny then, and the Fair involved a noisy processions of revellers, all wearing horns and sometimes masks, sounding on ‘rough music’ and setting out to Charlton from Cuckold’s Point, then near Deptford.1
A further biblical link is holy Moses, yet another term for cuckold. This was 17th century and probably required the kind of scriptural knowledge we have long discarded. Pictures of Moses, wishing to ally him to the saints, but unwilling to go, as it were, the whole hog, pictured him with not a full halo, but a cut-down demi-version. This, placed as such adornments are, meant that its two curved ends appeared behind his head. Just like ‘horns’. Thus stand Moses meant to to have another man’s illegitimate child fathered upon one’s wife; one is then obliged by the parish to maintain it.
The traditional source of cuckoldry lays blame on the lustful wife (she too is horny, but the term if not the desire seems to be a 19th century creation, rather than the longer-established vocabulary of the cuck’s adornment) but fair do’s. Handsy lusty-guts and duplicitous meat-mongers are one thing and bored City matrons just wanna have fun. If that means hubby gets long-cocked, the unhung man’s terror, well, nature can be mean. Given male worries about such dimensions, there exist a number of terms for the large and small penis — although given the prevalence of those worries, perhaps there should be more. The small penis can be an IBM (not the computer firm but ‘itty bitty meat’) or a puppy, and other mini-dicks are shrimps, periwinkles, jelly beans, knick-knacks, bugfuckers and chihuahuas ; a stringbean is thin; large penises are donkey-dicks, and those who have them are donkey-rigged, hung, well-hung or donkey-dicked (the miniaturised version is hung like a stud mosquito, a cashew, a hamster, a mouse and an amoeba). If the penis is larger at the top than at the base it is bell-topped or bell-swagged and rantallion, according to the omniscient Francis Grose ‘one whose scrotum is relaxed as to be longer than his penis.’
But above all, don’t overlook the i-word. I-word? Impotence. Not the temporary embarrassment of the brewer’s droop or a bad case of the tins, but the full-on dropping member, the limber leg, the deadly doolittle. John Dolittle (issuer of the poetical ‘Summons’ above) or the Latinised Domine doolittle is the impotent himself. Our Cit’s money-bag may bulge, but if the master’s purse is empty, then the mistress’s equivalent, purse once more, must seek out alternative occupation.
Slang, no surprises, is unforgiving when it comes to a world, long before supportive blue pills, wherein those who could not fuck were fucked. Terms for the erect penis (the stiff deity, the fixed bayonet, the star-gazer) include horn (late 19th century) but if it bears the same root as cuckoldry, it carries a different meaning. The trend is downwards. The partially erect penis is the lob or lazy lob, the dobber, the Bacchus Marsh (‘the spongy area halfway between Ballerat and Melbourne’ or so claims Roger’s Profanisaurus) and the half a mongrel (another Australiansim, from crack a mongrel, to achieve erection; 17th century mongrel was a hanger-on among con-men but the link is unlikely).
But these are mere way-stations, last-minute hopes. Let us cut to the chase; the unalloyedly limp dick is an Irish horse or Irish rise (though Irish inch, toothache and toothpick all promote the upstander; however the Irish disease is penile brevity), a dropping member, muddy waters or Hanging Johnny (especially if suffering a venereal disease as well) and a dead rabbit (better associated with a mid-19th century New York Irish gang). The brewer's droop refers to impotence through an excess of alcohol (the part-antithesis, piss proud, is to have an early morning erection through the need to urinate but the piss is urine, not alcohol). Whiskey-dicked suggests that hope has succumbed to the harsh reality of experience, while the negative effects of heroin (duji) on one’s erection are found in duji out.
Impotence suggests an inability to create, whether words or pictures: no ink in one’s pen, no lead in one’ pencil (the pencil, qualified at times as pencil dick or prick, itself is a small penis). One can shoot blanks and fumble, thus the fumbler, near-invariably old and the natural target of #metoo had the hashtag militants existed in the 16th to 18th centuries. So creepy a figure was free of fumbler’s hall. It was not a privilege one pursued. Around 1685 diarist Samuel Pepys collected a ballad, ‘Cuckolds all a-Row’, which included ‘A Summons issued out from the Master-Cuckolds and Wardens of Fumblers-Hall, directed to all Henpeckt and Hornified Tradesmen in and about the City of London.’
Its synonym, hussington, from huss, to grope sexually and Sussex dialect, to caress, was reduced to a handful of sprats (the ever-piscine female genitals) now intercourse eluded him. Grope appears c.1367, and caries on strong: e.g. Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses (1583): ‘What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and vncleane handling is not practised.’ If all that transmuted to the two-backed beast it is left unstated. Fam, not yet from family but famble, a hand, is a synonym of grope, thus to fam a dona, in genteel euphemism, ‘to take liberties with a woman’.
The impotent penis or its possessor was a a bobtail (usually horse with its tail trimmed short), a chitterling, a dangle, a dryball, a flapper, a flat tyre, a drip-dick or noodle dick, a stuffed eel-skin and, unarguably, a soft-cock. It could also be an inspector of the pavements, condemned eternally to ‘looking down’ (in other contexts it meant a man in the pillory). Broken arrow suggests a degree of romance. Grose, again, adds fuck-beggar and defines it as ‘an impotent or almost impotent man whom none but a beggar-woman will allow to “kiss” her.’
You love me longtime? I doubt it.
for an excellent summary of the event, try https://pasttense.co.uk/2021/10/18/today-in-londons-festive-history-traditional-rowdy-popular-procession-shindig/
Indeed. First ex. I have is: 1929 [US] Gettysburg Compiler (PA) 27 Mar. 4/5: ‘Rolly polly, bright and jolly!’ Maybe ‘Remmy,’ my faithful typewriter, should have spelt it, ‘Roly poly, holy moly!’.
Is holy-moly related to Holy Moses?