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

[Joel S. Berson]

At 2/20/2012 08:40 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>So WTH does it mean? Are they still sure it's part of her dress?
>
>JL

I apologize for not searching out the footnotes to the 1994 edition
of the Towneley Plays.  If it has a note on this.  If it has
footnotes at all.  If I could read.  I'll leave that to the Oxford gnomes.

:-)

P.S.   Altick writes "a passage alludes to the medieval women's
fashion of wearing a headdress in the form of cow's horns. ... the
word 'cuker,' evidently referring to this headdress ...".  So perhaps
the definition should be altered to ""Some part of a *medieval*
woman's *head*dress."  If one believes the end of the first sentence
is related to the second sentence.

Or perhaps everyone is wrong -- and what "hyngys so side now, Furrid
with a cat skyn." is a merkin.

JSB


>On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      "cuker, n.", "Some part of a woman's dress"
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > 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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