cucking stool
- noun
- Archaic
:
silla de sumergir
- The town square once featured a cucking stool used to punish petty offenders.
Examples
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The cucking stool was a notorious punishment device in the Middle Ages.
-
Women accused of gossiping were sometimes sentenced to the cucking stool.
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The village displayed the old cucking stool as a reminder of harsher times.
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Many offenders were subjected to the cucking stool for minor crimes.
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In the past, the cucking stool was used to punish those accused of witchcraft.
-
During the medieval period, individuals found guilty of slander could be put in the cucking stool.
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The cucking stool, once placed in the village square, served as a public warning to potential wrongdoers.
Synonyms
1
9.9
A chair on a lever used to dunk people in water as public punishment in the past
How Punishing
- Archaic
1
9.9
- Archaic
Surface Forms
Morphology
cucking + stool
Although 'stool' (a single-person seat) is transparent, the element 'cucking' is archaic and not a recognizable productive modifier for a B1 learner, so the punishment sense (a chair used for ducking offenders into water) cannot be derived from the parts. The historical and specialized meaning is idiomatic/lexicalized and not predictable from the constituents or from common cross-linguistic patterns, making it opaque to learners.
Etymology
Cucking stool comes from a real chair used long ago to punish people. In that name, cucking shows the dunking action and stool is the chair people were tied to and dipped into water, so the phrase now names that 'punishment' device.