another -ee

[Laurence Horn]

OK, so "exoneree" isn't that new or that rare.  Here's another one
which is, if not necessarily newer, at least rarer and ambiguous to
boot.

 From _Brazzaville Beach_, a 1990 novel by William Boyd (p. 181):
==========
She went into the bedroom and changed the sheets.  "Shouldn't _he_ be
doing this?" she thought, allowing herself to feel a little bitter.
Surely this job was one for the adulterer, not the adulteree.
==========
--so here "adulteree" is the injured party, the narrator whose spouse
has committed adultery, and hence the cuckold (or non-existent female
counterpart thereof) of days of yore.  A nice case of
adversative/patient/victim -ee, I thought (cf. amputee).  But when I
googled, virtually all the "adulterees" I found, which were (like the
above example) primed by the corresponding -er form, referred not to
the injured party but to the co-conspirator or enabler, i.e. the
other (wo)man in the relationship. Thus the first cite mentions "the
innocent, the adulterer, and the adulteree", i.e. the
not-necessarily-married person one commits adultery WITH, rather than
(in the relevant sense) ON.

Of the four Nexis hits in the "Major Papers" category, three
"adulteree"s are the adversative types and I wasn't sure which way to
gloss the fourth.  The earliest was 1993, but I'm not claiming
coinage rights for William Boyd (or Hope Clearwater, his narrator);
semi-productive morphology is tricky that way.  No listing in either
OED or AHD, but I think it's a nice formation, even (or maybe
especially) though it's ambiguous.  At least it's sex-neutral and
relatively transparent, unlike "cuckold".

larry