"cuker, n.", "Some part of a woman's dress"

[Joel S. Berson]

In the OED resides the noun "cuker", described as "Obs. rare", with
one quotation:

"a1500  (1460)    Towneley Plays (1994) I. xxx. 412   The shrew..is
hornyd like a kowe..The culer hyngys so side now, Furrid with a cat skyn."

I trust that when progress proceeds into the C's, the editors will
finally catch up with a discovery made by the Huntington Library a
few years before the 1950 publication of Richard D. Altick's "The
Scholar Adventurers" (Macmillan).  On page 198 he describes how when
the "Toneley manuscript was examined for the first time under the
ultraviolet light the word turned out to be 'culer,' so that when the
dictionary is revised 'cuker' must be deleted and 'culer' substituted instead."

Two oddities:

1)  The entry is described as "Second edition, 1989" (although
"online version December 2011"), whereas the edition of the Towneley
Plays cited is 1994.  (Does "online version ..." sometimes mean an
entry *has been revised* since 1989?)

2)  The OED quotation plainly has "culer"* -- but the headword is
"cuker"!  [The OED has no entry for "culer, n."]

Cul!  Culer! Culest!

Joel

* Apparently the 1994 edition of the Towneley Plays (published by
Oxford Univ. Press) knew about the Huntington discovery.

JSB

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