We in North America are most familiar with cuckoo birds in the form of those little mechanical birds that jump out of German clocks coincidentally named cuckoo clocks.

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But the birds are flesh-and-blood-and-feathers in Europe; not the product of some crazed clockmaker-cum-puppeteer of centuries ago.

The wooden, or these days maybe plastic, birds that poke their heads out of dark brown clocks sometimes give voice to their chirping call by means of tiny bellows in the clock.

Perhaps electronic chips are more common these days.

It’s the chirping of the real birds that gave the cuckoo its name.

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say: “A bird… well known by the call of the male during mating time, of which the name is an imitation… It is a migratory bird, arriving in the British Islands in April, and hence welcomed as the ‘harbinger of spring’.”

The records show that this bird has gone by this name in English for more than 800 years.

Of course to me it’s a robin that’s the “harbinger of spring.”

If a person is called cuckoo it means that they are “crazy” but this usage didn’t show up until about 100 years ago.

Earlier than that the meaning was more gentle. For about 400 years someone who was cuckoo was merely foolish.

This could have been because the foolish cuckoo bird had such a silly monotonous song.

But it could also have been something to do with the mating habits of cuckoo birds. The OED goes on: the cuckoo “does not hatch its own offspring, but deposits its eggs in the nests of small birds.”

Like, what kind of a foolish mother bird would lay its eggs in someone else’s nest?

In actual fact this is a pretty good reproductive strategy. Having someone else raise your kids gives you more time to play.

A number of other species have been successful with this strategy, including some humans.

And so it is that when humans exhibit similar behavior they take the word used to describe it from this bird.

Let’s imagine that Bob and Sue are married. But Sue sleeps with Jim and gets pregnant. Bob might end up raising Jim’s kid. So what’s the word that describes Bob?

Poor Bob is a cuckold.