Originally Posted by
Jock Scot
Is this Bride and Groom cake thing a regular occurrence in your part of the world? I must confess that I have never heard of it happening before.
I'm with you, I can't recall knowingly seeing a Groom cake, and I used to pipe at 40 or so weddings a year.
BTW what does the Groom groom? Does he groom the Bride?
It's an example of "folk etymology" where a word falls out of use in a language except for being used in a compound, it then sounding strange, and being altered to a word still used in the language. Bryd-guma "Bride-Man" made sense when guma (cognate with human) was still a common word for "man" or "person". When guma fell out of use Bryd-guma didn't make sense so guma was changed to a word that sounded similar and sort of made sense.
The were in Were-wolf ("man-wolf") BTW is another old English word for "man", cognate with virile.
Proud Mountaineer from the Highlands of West Virginia; son of the Revolution and Civil War; first Europeans on the Guyandotte
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