Basket weaving, pouring the pork, doing it 😘

The history of slang and how difficult times impacts it

May 01, 2024

Hey horny readers! We’re living in difficult times and younger generations are having less sex than ever (according to reports). What can we learn about difficult times by looking at the history of slang?

As always, thank you so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter! If you’re enjoying it, please share with friends, so they can be hilariously informed.

Share Adult Sex Ed

Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.

Ready to get a little smarter? Okay, let’s go!

Follow me on instagram

PS - Hope to see you at one of the ADULT SEX ED LIVE SHOWS coming up this Spring (NY, LA, and streaming)! Details below.

At least once per week, I’ll stumble upon an article or think-piece about Gen Z and how incredible unsexy they are. They are anti-porn, against sex scenes in films, and they’re not fucking. Nearly 40% of young adults surveyed in California in 2021 had no sexual partners in the prior year. Sure, some of that can be blamed on Covid and there’s no doubt we’re living through difficult times. So, which came first—the lack of horniness or the feelings of hopelessness?

Last year, I posed a question in the newsletter: Can we learn about the evolution of cultural attitudes about gender, bodies and sex by exploring the history of slang? To find out, I did a deep dive on the history of euphemisms for the vagina in May, and euphemisms for masturbation in July. In September, I wrote about slang for promiscuity and this past January, I wrote about slang for pregnant women and their bodies. All of these posts are linked below. So, what about slang for sex? What can learn about how people pull through difficult times by the way that euphemisms have popped up?

I spent a couple of hours last night perusing Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the largest historical dictionary of English slang written by Jonathon Green. The most striking thing about the euphemisms for sex was that they really haven’t evolved much at all!

People started to “fuck” in 1508 and “thread the needle” in 1573. In the 1600s, people were “basket weaving,” “humping,” and “joining giblets.” Sure, a few euphemisms sound like they’re stuck firmly in colonial times, like “playing fast and loose with a woman’s apron strings” and “give one’s arse a salad,” which apparently referred to having intercourse in the open air, and not the salad that you were probably thinking of. I’m really not sure that I would ever want to “do a plaster of warm guts,” but that’s something that the people of the 1600s wanted to do, too.

Sex in the early 1700s sounded fun and grand. Folks liked to “whip it,” “put the Pope into Rome,” “shoot London Bridge,” and “ride a dragon upon St. George.” In the mid 1700s, people liked to “get a slice” and “play at Adam and Eve,” but who would want to fuck like those two clueless fools, amiright?

Then, something peculiar happens. In 1776, “be in a woman’s beef” marks the last slang term until 1783, the exact years of the American Revolutionary War. It’s not that people don’t have sex during wartime—but apparently, they stopped talking about it. Or at least, they stopped inventing really funny sayings about it.

Cut to 1785. For the rest of that century, people were back to “taking a turn in cock alley,” “shagging,” and “doing the business.” For the next few years, there are plenty of new euphemisms—that is, right up until the War of 1812. The inventive sexy talk completely disappears again.

The rest of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s brought more euphemisms that people will feel pretty familiar with today, like “skin the cat,” “pop it in,” get some,”and “horizontal refreshment.” Sex was a “flash in the pan” until World War I started. From 1914-1918, there were no new entries into Green’s Dictionary of Slang. There’s also a pronounced drop-off during World War II.

I’m not saying that people didn’t have sex during wars, whether they were in battle or at home. It’s well documented that over 300,000 United States servicemen got STIs during World War I alone! But maybe it felt a little more uncouth than usual to talk about it. Maybe people were a little less inventive, even if they weren’t any less horny. But, after each of these wars, there was a big uptick in euphemisms too!

So, perhaps there’s hope for sexless Gen Z. Maybe they’re just a few years away from inventing their own versions of “pile-driving” and “hiding the salami.” I sincerely hope so.

Thank you for reading Adult Sex Ed. This post is public so please share it with friends.