Wittol

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sigrin Newell from Albany, New York.

Hi, Sigrin or Sigrid?

Sigrin with an N.

Sigrin with an N. Welcome.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, my question is, you are always talking about new words and how they come into the language, and I recently encountered an old word that seems to me like it ought to be in the language, and so my question is, how and why is it that old words fade out of the language, even when they’re perfectly acceptable and ought to be really usable words.

-huh. Well, you’ve got our curiosity peeked. What’s the word?

The word is wittol, W-I-T-T-O-L.

And tell us what it means.

It is a man who knows that his wife has a lover, and he’s okay with that.

Mm—

-huh. Why do you think he’s okay with that?

Well, for whatever reasons. He tolerates that.

He may think that she should have the same freedom that he has.

Yeah, and this word is related to the English word wit.

It has to do with knowing, right?

I presume as much.

Yeah.

So your question is, it’s not as if women aren’t still running around on their husbands, some of them, right?

Right.

So why don’t we ever hear this word?

I mean, it’s probably a new word to most people.

Yeah.

I was surprised in 40 years I’ve never encountered it in all the things I’ve read.

And it just was like, wow.

Well, where did you encounter it?

I encountered it in a book called The Artful Nuance by Rod Evans.

In that book, he talks about pairs of words and how they are different.

So he was pairing it with cuckold.

Okay.

So it wasn’t a piece of fiction where somebody just mentioned in passing.

No.

A whittle.

And so you’re saying that this is drawing a distinction between the word cuckold, which is a man who may not know that his wife is having an affair, and the fact that in the case of Whittle, he does know.

He does know, and he’s okay with that. He accepts it.

I’m browsing at the moment through some pages in Jeffrey Hughes’ Encyclopedia of Swearing.

He has a really nice entry on cuckoldry, and he talks about Whittle.

And what he suggests here is that maybe the reason the man is okay with it is because at this period in history, a woman and her belongings were basically considered both the property of a man.

And so if a woman took a lover, she was likely to receive gifts from him of jewelry or other expensive things.

And so they actually then would belong to the husband.

So maybe the husband saw his wife as a profit source.

So that’s why it was a 14th century medieval word.

Yeah, I do recommend Jeffrey Hughes’ book.

It’s called The Encyclopedia of Swearing.

It’s got some really nice stuff.

This is a highly academic book.

This isn’t some little guffawing, throwaway, nothing book.

It’s very sophisticated, well-researched, and has good stuff in it.

But, you know, one interesting thing is he also mentions elsewhere in the book two words for a woman who is being cheated on and that have kind of fallen out of the language as well.

Well, one is cuckween, right?

That’s right.

C-U-C-K-Q-U-E-A-N.

Queen meaning a woman regarded as being disreputable, especially a prostitute.

And then the other one is cornuta, C-O-R-N-U-T-A.

Because cornuto used to be a way of referring to a man as being a cuckold, someone who was being cheated on.

And, of course, that’s the feminine version.

Well, the question for me is, you know, how come we stopped using these words?

Because, as you say, the behavior continues.

I was going to get around to that.

There’s certainly trends in language are not unheard of.

I think maybe we don’t read Shakespeare as closely as we used to.

It probably has a little bit to do with it.

Remember how we referred to a woman being perceived as a property of a man?

A lot of the social mores around the relationships between men and women and the law governing those relationships.

Remember, you used to be able to be punished for adultery by the law.

It was something that was handled by your local government or your church, and it wasn’t something that was handled in the home, which is the case today.

And as these mores and these laws changed, then the need for this kind of language perhaps faded away.

And perhaps there was no need to make the distinction between someone who knew he was being cheated on and someone who didn’t know.

I see.

Well, Seguin, thank you for the interesting call.

Maybe our conversation today on the air will bring the word whittle to enrich the lives of vocabulary of people nationwide.

Thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve run across a word that has you wondering, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.