CORNUDO AND INSULTED

 

As society progresses towards equality, words are left by the wayside, unused, and now meaningless. The once offensive and much on everybody´s tongue, the Spanish word for cuckold, "cornudo" (also "cabrón") is losing its offensiveness. However, many of these disappearing words are kept very much alive in phraseology. A perfect example is "encima (tras) de cornudo, apaleado", which has the English equivalent of "add insult to injury." Run-of-the-mill workbooks do not list this idiom and I suspect this is because they try to skirt the "cornudo" word. Sánchez Dragó wrote in his El camino del corazón (1990): "Me siento cornudo y apaleado." Someone must have injured him and then, to boot, insulted him. María Moliner tells us that: Frase con que see comenta, en tono de amargura, conmiseración o burla, el hecho de que alguien, después de sufrir un perjuicio, es maltratado o culpado."