Based on the chatter in and on both traditional print and electronic media and the new pervasive social media, two of the main topics dominating in Barbados these days have to do with getting laid off and getting horned.
Even visiting Sandals Resorts chief, Gordon “Butch” Stewart, got into the act during his address to the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday, when he started a response to a probing question from a member of the audience by telling the story of a man who returned home unexpectedly one day only to find his wife horning him with another man, who happened to be one of his best friends.
According to Stewart, the husband flew into a rage, pulled out his gun and shot the man several times until he lay dead on the bed.
At that point, all of us in the room were listening intently to hear if the man also shot the wife afterward, or if the wife, in order to save her own life, offered some lame excuse like she was being raped by her husband’s best friend, or if the husband turned the gun on himself, blew out his own brains and provided company for the best friend on the other side.
But the ending of the story was nothing like that or anything else you would or could imagine. Stewart had the packed Hilton Barbados ballroom in stitches with laugher when, in his 100 per cent Jamaican accent, he revealed that the wife simply looked at her husband and warned, “If you keep on doing that you soon ain’t going have any friends left.”
Have you ever been horned? The saying is that it’s not a horn if you don’t know about it. It’s only when you see it for yourself, like in the story above, or some trusted friend or malicious hater tells you about it that it becomes a horn.
Surprisingly, no dictionary that I have checked has anything to do with infidelity, sexual or otherwise, as a meaning for horn.
Maybe, the scenario of horning somebody or getting horned spawned from the word “horny”, which the dictionary defines as desiring sexual gratification or being excited sexually. So it can be deduced that if a person who desires sexual gratification or is excited sexually and satisfies that desire or excitement in the arms of somebody else’s boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, is, in fact, horning the partner of that person.
I once knew a then young man who heard he was getting horned and not finding his girlfriend at home one night climbed a tree in the driveway and waited to see if one of her girlfriends or a man would bring her home. Eventually, when he saw it was indeed a man and that he was indeed getting horned in front of his own eyes, he leapt from the tree to the roof of the car screaming in agony like Tarzan when Jane caught the wrong vine to swing along on.
Another friend who thought he saw his girlfriend getting into a car with a strange man and fearing he was getting horned, ran all the way from Swan Street to Bay Street, via Roebuck Street, Crumpton Street, past the Cathedral, across the Chamberlain Bridge, past the old hospital and Government Headquarters, only to discover it was not his girl when the car pulled into the gas station.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.
