Cuck

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Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

D, E, K, N, T, U, and center C (all words must include C).

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know cuck can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

I know what you’ll probably think when I confess this: cuck was the first word I typed in today’s Spelling Bee puzzle. I was thinking of the noun, too.

Yes. That noun.

If you do a search on Medium for either “cuck” or “cuckold”, you’ll find plenty of information on this term that became popular during the Trump administration for several reasons. John McDermott wrote about one of them, and reviewed the origin of the word in his 2016 article. The neologism “cuckservative” became yet another alt-right insult, akin to RINO, although it seems the latter won in popularity over the past couple of years or so.

And last August Jerry Falwell resigned from Liberty University after it was revealed he enjoyed having a cuckold relationship with his wife and the pool guy. Frankly, he should have quit over his lack of originality. The pool boy? How cliché!

Demeter deLune discussed Falwell in her great article about cuckolding as a fetish, and why that was the least of the reasons he should have quit.

Okay, then. I’ve mentioned two Medium writers and their articles here. Hopefully it will bring some karma my way.

Like I said earlier, the first word I typed in today’s puzzle was cuck, all but certain it would be rejected. And it was. Possibly because the New York Times considers it offensive. What surprised me when I checked the dictionary was discovering that it was a verb not related at all to the term cuckold.

Ye olde dunke chair

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. Cuckold probably came from the Old French word for the cuckoo, cocu, an onomatopoeic name based on the European bird’s mating call. Some of the female species are know to leave eggs in other birds’ nests for them to hatch there.

Cocu became suffixed as cucuault to refer to the husband who was unknowingly raising children not his own, and by extension the husband of a cheating wife. Old French cucuault turned into Middle English cokewold and eventually we ended up with cuckold.

The woman who turns a man into a cuckold is called a cuckquean. And she does this by cuckolding him. In other words, the noun form is also the verb form.

Which means cuck, as a verb, has nothing to do with cuckold. As Merriam-Webster explains, to cuck is to punish by use of the cucking stool. And the latter was derived from the verb cukken, meaning to defecate. So people being punished were sitting on the “pooping chair”.

And who was routinely punished on a cucking stool? Not surprisingly, women. Strong women. Women who took a stand, or who fought back, or who didn’t just want to accept things as they were.

They were called scolds back then. This was actually a legal term way back when in England and Wales. As Sir William Blackstone explained in his 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England:

“Lastly, a common scold, communis rixatrix, (for our law-latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood. For which offence she may be indicted; and, if convicted, shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language signifies the scolding stool; though now it is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgment is, that, when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.”

Francois Maximilian was a French traveler and writer. He gave details about the procedure after witnessing it via zoom, I think.

“The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an armchair to the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other, so that these two pieces of wood with their two ends embrace the chair… that a person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down… the chair hangs just over the water. They place the woman in this chair and so plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat.”

I wonder if Mr. Francois “I’m an effin’ sadist” Maximilian would have thought it was pleasant enough if he had been tied to a chair and dunked in water repeatedly to cool his immoderate heat.

Originally cucking stools were simply chairs into which the offender would be tied and exposed at her door or the site of her “offense”. Some were fitted with wheels so the women could be dragged around the and further humiliated. Later, the term “ducking stool” and “cucking stool” eventually became interchangeable, as the practice of waterboarding these poor women grew in popularity.

This form of punishment made its way across the pond to the English colonies, and continued to be put in practice after the United States became independent. Not surprisingly, it was also used to identify witches, first with the chair, later without.

This illustration shows four men taking on one old woman tied to a chair. Fair trial, right? That’s what seemed to pass for “doing the right thing” in Salem back in 1693.

Ye moderne dunke tanke

You would think cuck laws would have no longer been around after the 1960s second-wave feminist movement.

You would be wrong.

Technically-speaking, New Jersey maintained the law in its ledgers until 1972. That’s not a typo. Not 1872, but 1972.

It’s not like the law was enforced, at least not according to family friends I have in New Jersey who’ve been living there forever. (Although, to be honest, living in New Jersey can seem like forever no matter how many years you’ve actually been there.)

But a few months before I was born, a woman named Marion Palendrano was indicted on three charges. The first two were the usual Real Housewives franchise stuff: atrocious assault and battery and threatening to kill someone.

The third charge was more interesting… and medieval.

The Grand Jury of Monmouth indicted Marion as “a common scold and disturber of the peace of the neighborhood and of all good and quiet people of this State to the common nuisance of the people of this State.”

Scold. In 1970.

In order to make it obvious how absurd this was, the case actually cited the definition we quoted earlier from Sir William Blackstone… written two hundred years before the indictment.

Fortunately the New Jersey Superior court held that being a common scold was no longer a crime. Not because it was ridiculous, but because it had been superseded by the New Jersey Disorderly Persons Act. Fortunately, that act did not include dunking people in water as punishment.

Oh, and they also “expressed concern” that a female-only crime violated the 14th Amendment’s provisions for equal protection under the law. Well, how about that? It only took them two centuries after the Constitution was written to figure it out.

Fifty years later, I am happy to report that no women are being dunked against their will in rivers or ponds because they dared to challenge the status quo or rejected a drunkard who was hitting on them.

Now women are volunteering to be dunked in plexiglass booths at fairs, parties, and sporting events.

Most people seem okay with it now.

Probably because most people don’t realize this activity has its origins in a very racist carnival game called the African Dodger.

In any case, next time you go to the state fair and manage to hit the target and dunk someone into a booth full of water, you can scream out loud that you “cucked” them. After which you will promptly be escorted out.

Not for your foul language. But because the editors of the Spelling Bee puzzle decided that cuck is a dord.*

Please check out my previous entry on another dord*:

*What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: