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

[Laurence Horn]

Well, at least it's unlikely to be "some part of a nun's garb (erron. Browning)", as in the celebrated NID2 entry for _twat_, n.  Besides, if it is really _culer_ and derives from French, it would be a covering for the other side.

LH

On Feb 19, 2012, at 11:55 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> 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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