Word: cornuto
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Dates: during 1938-1938
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...slight gesture was considered important testimony in a divorce case. Court Interpreter Vincent D'Agrossa volunteered to explain. This case involved an Italian couple, and to Italians the bit of old-world folklore had plenty of meaning. The gesture, said Interpreter D'Agrossa, was "what we call cornuto." It was an ancient custom to cut the spurs off castrated cocks and graft them to the birds' heads, where they grew as horns. Since the horned capon was a strutting definition of sexual inadequacy, its horns became a symbol of cuckoldry. The sign of the horns, he said...
...Marotta hotly defended herself. Everyone knew she was a good woman, she said. Everyone knew she had been acquitted of manslaughter after shooting her lover, Louis Gumas, six years ago. She had never made the cornuto sign behind her husband's back. She had not made love behind his back with her divorced husband Thomas Catanzaro; nor with Dr. Charles Stoerzer, sometime house physician of the Raymond Street Jail (her sometime residence); nor with "a tall, thin...
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