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

[Victor Steinbok]

Is that a culér you're wearing or are you just happy to see me?

     VS-)

On 2/20/2012 11:33 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> 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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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