A Little Lexicon of Love

Among Certain primitive tribes, even today, the men and women speak separate languages, members of one sex being strictly forbidden to utter or learn the language of the other. Since these same tribes procreate in great abundance, we can assume that courtships, complete with the equivalents of sweet nothings and passionate vows, are carried on in pantomime, like the game of charades.

In more sophisticated societies, although the two sexes speak the same language (more or less), they usually avoid the subject that is uppermost in their minds most of the time. or. if they do talk about it, they must speak by indirection. The poet Robert Graves neatly captured this state of affairs in just four short lines from one of his verses:

"Is this," she asked, "what the lower orders call ...?"

"Yes, yes," replied her lover, Lord Whitehall, "But hush! the expression is a trifle crude--" "Much too good for them," cried Lady Ermintrude ...

This epitomizes one of the many paradoxes attendant upon that most pleasurable of human activities, namely----

Namely what? That's precisely the point. The name is usually forbidden. Even the most emancipated and liberal of us, those who freely and unashamedly relish the act, feel that "the expression is a trifle crude." Like the ancient Hebrew name for God, we dare not pronounce it directly for fear of thunderous reprisals, but must instead concoct substitute words, evasions, cold clinical labels. The True Name has been banished to the ghetto of "bad language."

The deputy words offered by proper language are not merely flaccid and oblique--that would be bad enough--but the plain fact of the matter is that, clinical jargon and polite evasions aside, in proper language there is no word for the act of love.

No word, that is, that can be used as simply as "kiss," for example, is used in either its verb form ("He kissed her," "I want to kiss you") or its noun form ("Give me a little kiss," "A kiss on the hand may be quite Continental"). To be sure, the dictionaries are full of such words as "coition," "coitus," "copulate," "fornicate," "sex," and phrases like the pompous and formidable "sexual intercourse," but these--their austere and often pejorative qualities set aside for the nonce--are almost always dependent upon the clumsy crutches of auxiliary words: One can say "They fornicated," but in other constructions it is not so simple (one must say "He fornicated with her." "She copulated with him," "They performed coitus," "They had sex," and so on).

None of these words can stand alone, as "kiss" can. "He fornicated her" is ungrammatical, and so is "She wanted him to coit her" or "I'd like to copulate you," to say nothing of "Please sexual intercourse me, darling." These words are not only fussy, evasive and cowardly: they are downright incompetent. They do not work. They are indeed "bad language."

There is one true word (I speak not of slang), and only one, which needs no crutch; which, like "kiss," is both verb and noun; which can be used as simply as "kiss"; and which is exactly as short as "kiss" (one syllable, four letters). But this word, which most of us have spoken and all of us have heard, which is linguistically necessary, whose function is unique and irreplaceable, whose lineage stretches back to the dawn of the English tongue, is a word that proper language will not recognize, a word so interdicted and proscribed that it must not be printed on this page.*

Out of this reluctance to call a spade a spade--or perhaps "to call a heart a heart" would be more in keeping with our tender context--has sprung a miniature language or dialect, a little lexicon of euphemisms and nicknames for the act of love (itself a euphemism) and all that pertains to it.

Thus, the act--or Topic A--has been known as everything from the whimsical Playing House to the vivid Laying Pipe, and just about every category of word and phrase in between--except, of course, any word or phrase that comes close to being specific or direct. We have the mendacious Sleeping With; and its companion, the highly evasive Going To Bed With. Then there is Having Relations and Being Intimate (beloved of legal minds); Sexual Congress, Sexual Contact and the aforementioned Sexual Intercourse (favorites of the medical profession); To Know and To Lie With (of Biblical fame); Converse and Palliardise (fossils from Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary); the whole range of manufactory phrases--Make Love, Make Out, Make Whoopee, Make It, and simply Make; the itinerary Going The Route and Going All The Way; the Victorians' Having To Do With, Having His Way (continued on page 162)Lexicon of l*ve(continued from page 103) Of Her and The Physical; the Elizabethans' Tupping and Topping (the latter meaning "to butt, like a ram"); late 17th Century England's Swiving; the contemporary Britons' Bash, Sharvering and Having A Bit Of A Go At It; the hippies' Balling, Hocking. Humping and Scoring; all the way down to Scronching, the Yiddish Schtupping, Slipping It To Her and the bare essentials of Doing It (popularized by Cole Porter).

The foregoing sampler is a cross section of terms that are, or have been, au courant, this being the class of term that should occupy our closest attention here. Shakespeare's fine thrashing image, The Beast With Two Backs (in Othello) is admittedly gorgeous, but even though it was echoed a few centuries later by Graham Greene in Brighton Rock ("He eyed the slow movement of the two-backed beasts"), we cannot pretend it is on the tips of our tongues. Similarly, an obsessive Priapian in Take a Girl Like You, that splendid little comic novel by Kingsley Amis, refers to the act as The Old Hoo-Ha, a term I prefer to regard as the author's invention, until Mr. Amis apprises me otherwise.

It won't do to place total blame for these absurdities on Western tradition and to convince ourselves that civilizations older than ours, presumably wiser, and decidedly more exotic, have enjoyed a freer expression; for this may not be supportable by evidence. Indeed, Orientalist Lawrence E. Gichner, in his book Erotic Aspects of Chinese Culture, has attributed the proliferation of Chinese sex evasions to a species of Sinaean puritanism that rivals and probably surpasses the harshest rigors of Cotton Mather:

"The Chinese," writes Gichner, "have many colorful names for the act of copulation and the genitalia which is, in part, due to the fact that, traditionally, nothing was said about sex, a subject on which they were very reticent. Scholars had to submit their books to the Emperor for approval. Other scholars read them, and if any vulgar terms appeared, the author could be beheaded and his manuscript and books burned." That this resulted in a sexual patois "of beautiful symbolism" should not surprise us.

These beautiful symbols included One Spasm Of Cloud And Rain, A Whiff Of The Spring Wind, Playing Heads And Tails, Dew And Water Together, Love Birds Flying Shoulder To Shoulder, A Couple Of Phoenixes Behind The Curtains, Flowery Battle, Hidden Way, Wind And Willows, The Art Of Yin And Yang, Flying With The Wind And Sporting With The Moon, and innumerable others.

The positions of love were also given names by the Chinese. These began with the basic, unadorned title, Common; then soared into such fantasies as Dragon Up, Dragon Dance, Tiger Walking, Monkey Fighting, Turtle Jumping, Rabbit Nibbling, Locust Singing, Locust On The Tree, Flying Phoenix, Flying Seagull, Sliding Fish, Facing Fish, Two Fish Biting, Twisted Worm, Two Pheasants With One Heart, Mandarin Duck Playing, Butterfly Flying, Fallen Cedar Tree, Standing Bamboo, Large Bird And Small Chicken, Jumping White Tiger, Jumping Wild Horse, Racing Horse, Horses Shaking Their Feet, Playing Mountain Goat, Playing Cat And Mouse, Playing Dog In Autumn, Fighting Cocks, Singing Monkey Holding Trees, Jumping Mule In Springtime, Love Bird, Bird In The Cavern, Large Flying Bird, Dancing Birds, Two Fighting Birds, and Birds In Opposite Flight (also called Shrimp).

Damned clever, these Chinese, and also damned cryptic, unless one has access to a broad-minded and thoroughgoing Sinological savant like Mr. Gichner, in whose aforementioned book all these titles are decoded in great detail (but which, unhappily for the masses, is "privately published for use and study by scholars in the fields of anthropology and the social sciences; by physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists." Which, translated, means eat your heart out).

The words that make up the lexicon of love can be roughly divided into two groups--the approving and the disapproving--and nowhere is this more evident than in the words we have come up with to denote a woman who offers her affection on a cash basis.

Some of the approving (or, at least, fairly neutral) terms that have been used are: Courtesan, Concubine, Quean, Tart, Bona Roba, Lady Of The Evening, Lady Of Easy Virtue, Call Girl, Fancy Lady and the borrowed-from-French Poule, Fille De Joie and Demimondaine.

Among the disapproving expressions, we have Whore (which, perhaps because of its Biblical origins, is strongly pejorative in tone), Slut, Streetwalker, Chippy, Floozy, Bimbo, Tramp, Hooker, Loose Woman, Wanton, Prostitute and Prostie, Professional and Pro, such archaisms as Punk, Trull, Jade, Bawd, Strumpet, Hoyden, Harlot, Trollop, Callat, Callet, Commoner, Crack, Giglot, Blowen, Fricatrice, the perplexing Victorianism, No Better Than She Should Be (an evasion so successfully evasive that it makes no sense at all) and Harridan, which originally meant a broken-down horse.

Significantly, the "approving" list is the shorter of the two, even when strengthened by transfusions from another language and even though it includes a few words (like Tart) to which I have ascribed an approving or neutral tone purely arbitrarily and for no better reason than because they sound that way to me.

The places where these ladies ply their trade have been known by a dazzling array of names: Red Light District, Pleasure Palace, Crib, Stew, Brothel, Bagnio, Bordello, Cunny-Warren, and a whole boulevard of Houses, including plain House itself, Whore House, Hot House, Notch House, Sporting House, Bawdy House, Fancy House, Call House, Bad House, Disorderly House, Cat House, Can House, House of Prostitution, House Of Assignation, House Of Ill Repute, House Of Ill Fame and even (in Sheridan's The School for Scandal) House Of No Extraordinary Fame. Truly, a wide assortment of names reflecting the wide assortment of delights presumably found within these houses' portals.

Which brings us to that portal we all passed through when we entered this world, and which most of the male population is forever re-entering at the first opportunity, the forbidden four-letter name of which is descended from or allied to the kunta and kunte of Old Frisian, Old Norse, Germanic, Low German, Middle Low German and Modern Dutch; the conte of Medieval Dutch; the con of Medieval and Modern French; the cun and cunne of Old French; the queynte, cunte and counte of Middle and Old English; the cunno and conno of Italian; the cunnus of Latin; and even the word ka-t (which also meant "mother" and "womankind") of the Ancient Egyptian--a non-Indo-European language which, until now, I thought totally unrelated to English, and am charmed to find this seeming proof of a human basic interest inexplicably breaking the fetters of philological pedantry.

But no amount of old family ties (to say nothing of the strong phonetic and orthographic resemblance) has ever made the Modern English equivalent of these old words acceptable to proper language--and Modern English, remember, is the etymological period spanning the end of the 15th Century to the present day, thus embracing Shakespeare's time.

Speaking of Shakespeare, even he had to use subterfuge (I dare not say "cunning" lest you damn me for punning) in order to get the word spoken in his plays. His methods were many. In Hamlet, for example, he buried it in another word:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia: Ay, my lord.

Hamlet: Do you think I meant Country matters?

In Henry V, he slipped it into the English Lesson Scene, where Alice is teaching the French Princess the English equivalents of common French words. Here, "gown" is mispronounced "coun," which, being so close to the French con, causes the Princess to blush and decry the word as "mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique."

In Twelfth Night, he was reduced to spelling it out, a fact most English literature teachers are blithely ignorant of. Malvolio, coming upon a letter, thinks he recognizes the handwriting of the fair Maria: "By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus makes she her great P's." Here it must be assumed that the Elizabethan actor was instructed to pronounce the and that separates "her U's" from "her T's" not as and but as a broadly emphasized 'n'. To make sure the gag got across, Shakespeare immediately followed it with the "P's" reference, the meaning of which is obvious; and just in case it still laid an egg, he had Sir Andrew Aguecheek loudly echo: "Her C's, her U's, and her T's. Why that?" By this time, presumably, The Globe theater audience was helpless with laughter.

Elsewhere, however, Shakespeare, when he wished to write of the pudendum muliebre and its components, was forced to use such terms as Baldrick, Bird's Nest, Charged Chambers, Chaste Treasure, Dearest Bodily Part, Flower, Forfended Place, Gate, Glass Of Virginity, Nest Of Spicery, Pond, Ring, Rose, Velvet Leaves, Venus' Glove, and many others, including at least two images inspired by fruit: Plum and the rather ungallant Withered Pear (which invite comparison to the contemporary Italian fica, the square meaning of which is "fig"). This lengthy dwelling upon Shakespeare has the purpose of pointing up the depths of trickery and circumnavigation to which even the Swan of Stratford, in a notoriously ribald age, was required to resort, whenever he wished to make reference to what obviously was a favorite topic.

In our own century, that most plain-dealing and iconoclastic of writer-personalities, Frank Harris, whose autobiography was, until recently, high on the list of banned books, referred to it merely as Sex--a term which, unimaginatively, he applied to both the male and female organs: "my sex," "her sex."

This is not unlike the traditional Chinese bracket-phrase, The Tools Of Heaven And Earth, although China has not been backward in the invention of fanciful terms specifically for the female parts: Jade Treasure, Heart Of The Flower, Cinnabar Crevice, Golden Crevice, Jewel Terrace, Sacred Field, Female Palace, Hidden Gully, Dark Vale, Mysterious Pearl, Heart Of The Peony, Dark Red Valley, Scabard, Jade Gate, Precious Gate, Hidden Gate and Coral Gate, to which we might add the Golden Gate of the Japanese, who have also given us the homely Beans.

Although it is not to our purpose to comb the shelves of ordinary pornography--which is usually arid, lusterless and far from euphemistic--it would be shirking to avoid mentioning some of the many inspired names for the female parts that were spawned by the fertile brain of the 18th Century writer John Cleland, in his masterwork, the long-suppressed but now best-selling Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill): Main Spot, Main Avenue, Tender Cleft, Beggar's Wallet, Favorite Quarters, Center Of Attraction, Treasury Of Love, Genial Seat Of Pleasure, Delicate Glutton, Nether-Mouth, Soft Laboratory Of Love, Pleasure-Thirsty Channel, Theater, Cockpit, Stronghold Of Her Vartue.

How poverty-stricken and repetitious, by comparison, seem the team of Southern and Hoffenberg, whose novel Candy yields nothing more imaginative than the trudging sameness of: The Damp (twice), varied by The Sweet Damp and The Sweetening Damp, Sugar-Scoop, Pink Candy, Pudding, Pudding-Pie, Fur-Pie, Lamb-Pit (three times). Spice-Box. Jelly-Box (four times), Honey-Pouch, Honey-Cloister (twice), Honeypot (seven times) and Thing.

This uninventiveness is possibly a sign of our drab times, for the more common contemporary sobriquets for the female parts constitute a similarly dreary list that reaches the absolute nadir in a wildly inappropriate word denoting a cubical container of wood or cardboard: this word is so hard and angular that it does an injustice to the soft accommodation it professes to describe. Of all such words, the only one with any sensitivity or appeal, in my opinion, is that cuddly disyllable homonymous with a popular endearment for the domestic feline. The American Thesaurus of Slang, a work I find riddled with dubious ephemera, lists Receiving Set, a term surely too awkward and too "clever" to have had any real currency.

Nevertheless, it serves to draw the mind to its logical complement, which we could call Microphone or Broadcasting Station if we had a mind to, but which is more familiarly known by a string of names derived from words meaning "rooster," the diminutive for Richard, a synonym for "puncture," and so on. Occasionally, we may hear Stinger, especially in contexts involving the dipping of same into honey; and I have heard Peedinkle used by quite prim maiden ladies when referring to male infants. What would seem an obvious word, Pencil, is never used (Shakespeare did use Pen) except in references to Lead In The Pencil, the same phenomenon Boccaccio called Resurrection Of The Flesh.

Pornographers, who are constantly searching for synonyms for this member (Member itself, come to think of it, is a synonym), usually resort to Lance, Thrusting Maleness, and the like; John Cleland again being the only writer worth citing, for, in Fanny Hill, he did himself proud with Machine, Engine, Instrument (these often preceded by the adjectives "wonderful," "terrible," "enormous" or "plenipotentiary"), Nail, Truncheon, Maypole, Affair, Weapon Of Pleasure, Object Of Enjoyment, Battering Ram, Battering Piece, Conduit Pipe, Dear Morsel, Piece Of Furniture, Red-Headed Champion, That Capital Part Of Man, Sinew, Gristle, Blind Favorite, Wedge, Whitestaff, Master Member Of The Revels, Standard Of Distinction, Label Of Manhood, Scepter-Member, Master-Tool, Stake, Handle, IT and Sensitive Plant (in full: "the true, the genuine sensitive plant, which, instead of shrinking from the touch, joys to meet it, and swells and vegetates under it"). And, of course, the great Giovanni Boccaccio must once more be given a brief nod of acknowledgement for his Horn With Which Men Butt, Spade With Which Men Are Planted and his simpler Nightingale.

One bit of contemporary slang for this item, the purely descriptive Shaft, has undergone a strange decontamination, largely through the ignorance of naïve people. Thus, it was possible for the editors of a college humor magazine to call their publication Shaft without anybody on the faculty being the wiser, and it was also possible for Richard Nixon to use the word from coast to coast in his now-famous televised attack on the nation's press.

One common American term is unknown in Great Britain, and is the cause of considerable hilarity whenever the classic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury is performed by British casts for American audiences. If you will consult a score or libretto of this operetta published in the United States, you will be unaware of this, for you will probably find the following bland exchange of sung dialog:

Defendant: Is this the Court of the Exchequer?

Jury (belligerently): It is!

Defendant (to himself): If this is the Exchequer, My evil star's in the ascendant!

That, however, is an altered version, strictly for the Yanks. In England, Trial by Jury is sung the way Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it:

Defendant: Is this the Court of the Exchequer?

Jury: It is!

Defendant: Be firm, be firm, my pecker! ...

... Which was intended to mean no more than "Stiff upper lip," since, in England, "pecker," like the U. S. "kisser," means only "the mouth."

The Celestial Empire, not to be caught napping, is responsible for a goodly assemblage of terms for the male organ, as witness this display of chinoiserie: Great General. Lotus Stalk. Lotus Root, Ivory Scepter, Turtle's Head. Sword, Spear, Staff, Weapon, Warrior, Positive Peak, Jade Stem, Jade Stick. Jade Stalk, Jade Scepter, and so on. As we have seen before, the Japanese tend to be less poetic, relying on more mundane euphemisms, of which one example, Mushroom, will suffice.

It is perfectly natural that the breasts of women have earned a stunning variety of appellations. Of these, Tits is possibly the most used in this country, along with its diminutive, Titties: with Knobs and Knockers following closely in popularity, and Bubs. Boobs, Booboos, Bubbies and Boobies jiggling right behind them. Jugs, Pumps and Headlights are not unheard, although Milk Cans and Milk Fund do not enjoy real vitality. Quite common are the incomplete but fully communicative A Pair, A Set and (in Britain) A Brace. Perhaps equally common is the genteel Bosom and its jocular variant, Bazoom, both of which, ungrammatically, can become plurals at a moment's notice: Bosoms, Bazooms. The clinical Mammaries and Mammae are sometimes seen in print (their Elizabethan derivative, Mammets, has vanished); and we are all familiar with the "snowy hillocks," "twin doves," "creamy globes" and other devices of poets and pulp writers (one recalls such descriptive passages as Sir Philip Sidney's "Her breasts sweetly rose up like two fair mountainets"). From the personal repertoire of producer Paul DeWitt come Fun Bags. Num-Nums, Moo-Moos, Wibble-Wobbles, Tee-Tees, Ta-Tas and his own showboatish pronunciation of Boobs: Byoooobz!!! The highly euphemistic Charms seldom means anything other than breasts, and this is largely true of Curves also. Though ostensibly referring not to the breasts themselves but to the pleasant vale between them, the word Cleavage has come to mean, in practical application, not cleavage at all, but that which flanks and, indeed, causes the cleavage.

There is, as we all know and are glad of, another kind of cleavage, too, the kind which Guy de Maupassant, in a story, referred to as "the full, fresh, plump, sweet ischial tuberosities of my mistress." and which has been thoroughly discussed in Take Your Seats, which ran in this magazine in August 1957.

Here, therefore, I will merely list the 33 synonyms mentioned at that time: Ass, Arse, Fanny, Buttocks and Butt, Nates, Can, Prat. Backside, Rump, Duff, Behind and Hind and Hinder and Hind-End, Rear and Rear-End, South-End, Seat, Sitter, Bottom, Cheeks, Buns, Hindquarters, Tail, Tailbone, Posterior, Fundament, Keester, the truly euphemistic Hips, and, from other languages. Derrière (French). Tochus (Yiddish) and the clinical Gluteus Maximus (Latin). After publication, an English friend pointed out the neglect of the Cockney word, Bum, a Navy man called attention sternly to Stern, and other readers wrote in to contribute Rumble Seat and Landing Gear. A gentleman from Georgia declared: "In these parts, we say Hootenanny!" (Which is plumb ridiculous: Everybody knows what a Hootenanny really is. Don't they?)

Love's lexicon extends to the results of love. too, with pregnancy being seldom called that, but, rather, Expecting, Anticipating, Infanticipating. In A Family Way, A Duck In The Oven (or A Cake In The Oven), the French Enceinte, the hearty Elizabethan Great With Child, the Victorians' In A Delicate Condition and In An Interesting Condition--the latter snickeringly applied to a woman pregnant out of wedlock, being synonymous with In Trouble and the contemporary Knocked Up. The issue of such an unsanctified pregnancy, instead of being called illegitimate or a bastard, is more often referred to as Love Child, Natural Son (or Daughter). Born On The Wrong Side Of The Blanket, or (now obsolete) Baseborn, Whoreson and Adulterine. So lengthy is the reach of sexual euphemism that even a legitimate baby is often called something else: Blessed Event, New Arrival, Little Stranger, Bundle From Heaven, Present From The Stork. Tax Exemption, or The Patter Of Little Feet.

The Puritan stringencies--or Mandarin stringencies or what have you--that made love's lexicon necessary have certainly given us a vernacular of sometimes great charm, ingenuity and wit. Of comparable charm, ingenuity and wit are the piano-playing feats performed by some vaudeville artists while wearing boxing gloves. One smiles at these musicales and says, How clever. But one does not prefer all pianists to handicap themselves in this way, nor does one righteously demand they do so. Though the fog of circumlocution is finally beginning to lift a little, we still live in a split-personality world of sexual contradiction and paradox, a world bitterly viewed in the closing lines of a certain anonymous ode, of which The Psychiatric Quarterly thought highly enough to incorporate into one of its editorials:

... Cherish the use of the weaseling phrase

That never says quite what you mean.

You had better he known for your hypocrite ways

Than vulgar, impure and obscene.

*This footnote's asterisk is apt, because the word circuitously referred to above, in its rare appearances in specialized dictionaries, usually has one or more of its letters replaced by asterisks (out of fear, presumably, that the dictionaries might otherwise be banned, burned or impounded). In Eric Partridge's "Origins." for instance, it is rendered as F**k; whereas in Mr. Partridge's "A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English" it is given as F*ck, which would appear to be a step in the right direction, except for the glum chronological fact that the "Dictionary" is an earlier work than "Origins," and so the step is from one asterisk to two, and therefore not progress but regression. I must, while I've got you cornered down here in this footnote, add a touch of purely personal prejudice against the use of the asterisk in this manner. I mean, why must it be the asterisk? It is such a spiky, barbed, forbidding little symbol, not unlike the cactus or the porcupine. If letters must be replaced by surrogate signs--and I'm not endorsing such replacement for a moment--why not choose a sign more appropriate to the subject? I nominate the dynamic exclamation point, a proud, erect character which, with its round appendage, is admirably suited to the office. For, whereas there is something craven and defeated about F**k and even F*ck, there is a fine, bold, potent look to F!ck, and positively a call-to-arms effect about F!!k.