by Ralph Keyes
Time to Get Up
Whether a man’s sex organ stands erect, droops, or stays at half-mast is a subject of intense interest among mating couples and always has been. It’s not an easy subject to discuss openly, however. Euphemisms are called for.
“The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon,” observes Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. In Shakespeare’s time, noon was a euphemism for a penis as erect as the hand of a clock at midday—though wouldn’t it more likely be 11:45 or 11:30, unless the man was flat on his back waiting to be mounted? Stand was another Elizabethan era euphemism for an erect penis, one Shakespeare used to good effect in The Comedy of Errors: “When it stands well with him, it stands well with her.”
Mae West was the source of a popular erection euphemism. When she was the subject of a kidnapping threat in the mid-1930s, West left Hollywood for a couple of weeks. On her return, a group of friends and fans greeted the voluptuous movie star as she got off the train. One, a young L.A. cop, carried flowers. “These are from the fellas down at the station,” said the policeman as he handed her the bouquet. “Then he leant down and kissed me,” West later recalled, “and said, ‘And that’s from me. It’s good to have you back with us, Mae.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, and is that a gun you got in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?’ ” Based on many retellings, a gun in your pocket became an enduring allusion to an erect penis.
The antonym of “erection” is a touchy topic, one that has inspired lots of creative euphemisms. Some are based on pencils, appropriately enough, this term having the same root as “penis,” which is Latin for “tail.” In pre–word processing days, “having no lead in your pencil” was a common metaphor. As so often happens, this type of imaginative imagery has given way to flaccid euphemisms for impotence, first to the quasi-clinical erectile dysfunction and later—in ceaseless ads for Viagra and similar drugs—simply ED. Pharmaceutical companies, to say nothing of their customers, feel far more comfortable when they have initials rather than words—even euphemistic words—to characterize a man who can’t get it up.
Doing It
Referring to the sex act without calling it that has long challenged dramatists, among others. In Lysistrata, a group of Greek women tell their husbands that until they stop going to war, “I will not stretch up my slippers toward the ceiling.” A later English euphemism for sex was “look at the ceiling over a man’s shoulder.” Or, “pray with knees upward.” In Othello, when Iago tells Desdemona’s father that “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs,” members of Shakespeare’s audiences roared with laughter at this evocative image.
In Filthy Shakespeare, Pauline Kiernan identified several hundred euphemistic references to sex in the Bard’s plays. As this suggests, more euphemisms may have been devoted to sex than to any other topic. This would be hard to prove, however. The ubiquity of sexual euphemisms in our ancestors’ speech is difficult to verify because most were considered too vulgar to record. Nonetheless, enough were recorded that we can surmise how many more synonyms for sexual activity must have been used in olden-day conversations than ever appeared in print.
During the early eighteenth century, a Virginia planter named William Byrd kept a secret diary of his sexual activities. By his own account, Byrd accosted maidens, maids, slaves, widows, wives, whores—whoever he could get his hands on (including his own wife, in a pinch)—fooling with some, romping with others, and committing uncleanness with still more, an admission usually followed by the phrase “for which God forgive me.” Mostly, though, Byrd rogered his many amours, once, twice, thrice, or sometimes not at all. “The maid of the house came into my chamber,” he wrote on December 4, 1720, “and I felt her and committed uncleanness but did not roger her.”
Six decades later, a strapped English antiquarian named Francis Grose sought to replenish his coffers by publishing A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This 1785 volume and subsequent editions included street terms for sex that could be heard during Grose’s time, ones such as “swive,” “roger,” “hump,” “clicket,” “dock,” and “wap.” Grose’s dictionary is the first place where “shag” was used this way in print, defined as “To copulate. He is but bad shag; he is no able woman’s man.” Grose also included slangy phrases such as “basket-making” (defined as “copulation, or making feet for children’s stockings”), “buttock ball” (“the amorous congress”), “rantum-scantum” (“making the beast with two backs”), and “dry bob” (“copulation without emission”).
A century after Grose’s slim volume first appeared, a massive collection of American slang compiled by John Farmer and William Henley recorded hundreds of words that referred euphemistically to sexual activity. These ranged from the coarse (ballocking, belly bumping, under-petticoating) to the vulgar (take in cream, feed one’s pussy, suck the sugar stick), the banal (have connection, be intimate, be familiar), and the inventive (go star-gazing on one’s back, have a live sausage for supper, get a handle for the broom, dance the mattress jig, and do a four-legged frolic).
Women who were captured and raped by Indians used elliptical words to describe this experience once they were rescued. One Coloradoan who survived such an ordeal in 1878 told a military hearing that she was “insulted” several times by her Ute captors. Under questioning, the young woman elaborated a bit by saying that she’d been subjected to “outrageous treatment.” When the presiding officer asked, “Am I to understand that they outraged you several times at night?” she responded “Yes, sir.”
Sexual euphemisms no less than any other kind tell us something about their times. In the Decameron (1353), Boccaccio used “Put the devil into hell” as a metaphor for sex. Five centuries later, the common expression “forced his attentions on” suggested euphemistically that when it came to sex, dominant men imposed themselves on passive women. Such men took advantage. They had their way. Women, in turn, submitted. They surrendered. They sacrificed their honor. Or so it was assumed in Victorian times. By contrast what would Queen Victoria make of today’s euphemism friendship with benefits?
Late in her era think of England became a euphemistic way to allude to a certain kind of dutiful sex. It was based on a popular assumption that brides at this time were advised to “Close your eyes, and think of England” when letting their husbands have their way. This advice was so Victorian that it was widely assumed to come from Queen Victoria herself. (It didn’t. Among other things, the queen was hardly dutiful.) Wherever this recommendation originated, the image of a compliant young bride lying limply on her honeymoon bed, with eyes shut and a head filled with thoughts of Trafalgar Square, the Union Jack, and a nice hot cup of tea, was so evocative that close your eyes and think of England is still a euphemism for submissive sex.
As sexual euphemisms illustrate better than any others, the hotter the activity, the cooler the language we use to describe it in polite company. Such euphemisms put a placid verbal veneer on the fevered goings-on they describe. In one translation of Herodotus’s writing about the Nasamoni of northern Africa, the Greek historian reported, “When a Nasamonian man takes his first wife, it is the custom that on the first night the bride should be visited by each of the guests in turn.” According to another translation, the guests “lie” with the bride. Old Testament figures would often lie with their wives too, the better to know them.
For such a spicy endeavor, the euphemisms we use for sexual activity can be remarkably bland (which is the whole point, of course). In a mid-sixteenth-century book, French physician Ambroise Paré referred to wives being “strongly encountered by their husbands.” Pioneering sexologist Ivan Bloch described the case of a late-nineteenth-century British junior officer who visited a superior officer, then “enjoyed his wife on the sofa.” This resulted in a criminal conversation charge being filed against the younger man, a common euphemism for adultery in England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Crim. con. trials—in which a husband brought charges against his wife’
s lover—excited much public interest. Reading about them in the press was as close as many respectable Britons could get to consuming pornography.
Of course, it was possible to have a conversation without its being criminal. This is just one of many ordinary words that have been pressed into service as allusions to sex. Consider a sampling of ones that begin with c: commerce, communion, congress, connect, consort, convene, correspondence, couple, cover. Coital activity is more specific, as are coition, carnal knowledge, and conjugal relations. A 1940 study of “Morbid Sex Craving” among women converted cohabit, a euphemism for unmarried couples living together, into a much more active concept when discussing a twenty-five-year-old subject who “journeyed to a distant city and cohabited with at least ten of the football squad on the night before the game.”
Countless numbers of ordinary words may, or may not, refer to sexual activity, depending on the arch of one’s eyebrow. “See” is not an inherently erotic word, unless in the mouth of Mae West inviting Cary Grant to come up sometime and see her. Practically any verb can refer to sexual activity in context. Among the many meanings of the word “be” is “fuck.” (“I’d like to be with you tonight.”) “Know” is a perfectly innocent word until used, as it once was, to refer to sexual intercourse. (“She has known man”; “Adam knew his wife… and she conceived.”) At one time, this synonym for sex was embellished a bit to know biblically. (“They knew each other biblically.”) More recently, when a man on the make says “I’d like to get to know you better,” a woman at the alert takes precautions.
Even an innocuous word like “it” has erotic overtones when coupled with “do,” which is why the song “Let’s Do It” was at one time banned from the airwaves. From this perspective, a couple on a bed who are thrashing about, moaning, and shouting ecstatically, “Oh, my God. Yes! Yes! Yes!” are, you know, doing it. Sometimes “it” is dropped, leaving do as the operative euphemism, as in the woman’s magazine article “Six Guys to Do Before You Say ‘I Do.’ ” Based on such usage, a Miami Herald columnist once suggested that this two-letter word should only appear as “d-” in family newspapers.
In the recurring contamination process, though, over time even such innocuous euphemisms can take on the erotic charge of the act they allude to. “Copulate” evolved from a Latin term meaning “join together.” (Students in the 1970s, ridiculing the euphemisms of their parents’ generation, would ask, “Cop you late? What’s that supposed to mean?”) “Intercourse” originally referred to interaction between two or more people in the broad sense. At one time, to say “they had intercourse” meant simply “they communicated” or “they interacted” (though that, too, could have sexual connotations nowadays). Today, it would be suggestive in the extreme to say “Jason had some intercourse with Amy.”
“Making love” used to refer to little more than some ardent kissy face. In the early twentieth century, it escalated into something more, abetted by D. H. Lawrence’s frequent use of this phrase as a euphemism for sex in his fiction. By now, of course, making love and its close cousin lovemaking are the most genteel of euphemisms for this least genteel of activities. Sleep with is perhaps the most venerable euphemism of all, well known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and featured in a legendary courtroom exchange several centuries later:
“Did you sleep with this woman?”
“Not a wink, your honor.”
Go to bed with is a related euphemism, referring to an act that can take place not just on a bed, but also on the floor, in a car, or even inside a telephone booth. Yet what is one to do? As C. S. Lewis pointed out, when dealing with sex, “you are forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter, and the anatomy class.” When discussing this topic in polite company, our options are limited. Slang is out. Childish terms are, well, childish. (“They played doctor.”) Clinical words sanitize. One can foreignize, of course, referring to couples who have a liaison or a rendezvous, which, perhaps due to their Gallic origins, sound somewhat more reputable than their having an affair or an assignation. In general, though, we are left with all the it’s, do’s, and be’s, trusting context and knowing looks to convey our meaning.
LADIES OF THE NIGHT
If prostitutes are members of the world’s oldest profession, then devising alternative names for them is one of the oldest forms of euphemizing. Streetwalker— in use for more than four centuries—is among the most euphemistic. Christian essayist G. K. Chesterton once fretted that referring to women who sold their bodies as simply “ones who walked the streets” condoned this contemptible occupation. Other euphemistic terms that might have concerned Chesterton include sporting lady, fancy lady, lady of the night, working girl, call girl, and party girl. Perhaps alluding to their status as members of the oldest profession, some prostitutes in his time called themselves professionals. When academy was a euphemism for “brothel,” those who worked there were called academicians.
Prostitute first appeared in the early seventeenth century as a euphemism for “whore,” one that drew on the Latin verb prostituere, or “offer for sale.” (A female character in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, says “prostitute me to the basest groom / That doth frequent your house.”) Whore evolved from the Anglo-Saxon “hore,” which some etymologists think may have been a euphemism for a word never recorded. After “whore” took on connotations, sixteenth-century translations of the Bible replaced that word with harlot. This term originally referred to a disreputable young man, then was applied to women who liked to kick up their heels, then to prostitutes. In time, “harlot” itself became so contaminated that it could no longer appear in respectable publications.
Another synonym for “prostitute,” tart, has an interesting etymology. Originally that noun referred to a small pastry, as it still does today. Over time, “tart” was used affectionately for a sweet young woman, then for women considered sexually alluring. After that, “tart” became synonymous with a promiscuous woman. Finally, it referred to women who charged for sexual services, at best “A tart with a heart.”
During the American Civil War, camp followers, whose ranks included “canteen girls,” and “drink sellers,” offered soldiers their wares (themselves, mostly). Contrary to popular assumption, the term “hooker” did not originate with camp followers of soldiers commanded by Union General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Although it’s true that during General Hooker’s era, Washington’s many prostitutes were sometimes called “Hooker’s Division,” calling any such woman a hooker predates the Civil War by at least a couple of decades. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, “hooker” originally referred to prostitutes who worked in Corlear’s Hook during the mid-nineteenth century, a section of New York also commonly known as “the Hook.” They were hookers. Others believe that this appellation originated with the fact that prostitutes said they hooked customers. Their brothels were called hook shops.
Determining what to call prostitutes has long vexed members of the media. When a play opened in New York in 1934 that included a character called “The Young Whore,” one newspaper there changed her designation to “A Young Girl Who has Gone Astray.” Three years later, when Bette Davis played a prostitute in Marked Woman, her character was called a nightclub hostess. In From Here to Eternity (1953), the prostitute played by Donna Reed (yes, that Donna Reed) was referred to as simply a hostess. In the euphemism business, vagueness reigns.
At one time, model could be a euphemism for “prostitute.” (“Model for hire.”) Today, to the dismay of legitimate masseuses, their job title often doubles as such a euphemism. More often, contemporary call girls call themselves escorts, a term Amy Fisher—who once worked for an escort service—called “prostitution lite.” In the Philippines, Guest Relation Officer, or GRO, is a euphemism for “prostitute.” Teenage girls in Hong Kong, who go on paid “dates” with older men that may involve sex, call this compensated dating.
One of the most forlorn euphemisms for compensated sex that I’ve ever se
en was in a news article about South Asian women who’d been laid off from factory jobs. Asked what she and her colleagues were doing now, one said that a young coworker was engaged in “making men happy.”
Sex Talk
Early-twentieth-century blues singers vied to see how many sexual allusions they could bootleg into their recordings. In her euphemism-rich “My Handy Man,” Ethel Waters probably won this contest when she sang:
He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle,
Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle;
…
He threads my needle, creams my wheat,
Heats my heater, chops my meat;
…
Waters wasn’t the only singer putting euphemisms to song this way. Lizzie Miles’s “My Man O’ War” included the lines:
He storms my trench and he’s not afraid
His bayonets make me cry for aid
And Lillie Mae Kirkman’s “He’s Just My Size” had:
He’s a kitchen mechanic and he makes my biscuits rise
He uses the best baking powder and his biscuit’s just my size