Words: cornute, v.

LITTLE DO readers know of how prose changes shape before publication. Anybody who perused Simon Raven's recent review of a biography of Trelawny in the London Magazine would have noted his pleasingly antique phrase about the adventurer's marrying "a slut, [and] was himself speedily cuckolded".

In fact, Raven's preferred word, "cornuted", fell victim to editorial whim. As befits an author whose stock in trade is an elegant amalgam of sex and the Classics, this derives from the Latin for horn, which brings such meanings as a retort, a vexing question of logic, an animal - and somebody who has been horned, a cuckold. Let justice be done. Nobody should stand in the way of Raven's attempt to revive a word last used in 1707.