Un-f*cking-believable
How the language of sex might change in the next 4 years
Hi horny readers! This week’s post is about wordplay: how language about sex changed over time and what might happen in the next 4 years.
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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.
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Last Summer, I was a guest on the long-running NYC comedy show Vocabaret. The entire show is about word play and the theme that month was the word fuck. It’s a wonderful word, probably my favorite, and there was much to explore. For my set, I researched how slang about sex changed over time and what we can learn. It’s worth exploring this week.
When discussing the history of euphemisms for fucking, it’s important to recognize that the word itself is a euphemism. I spent a bunch of time poring over Green’s Dictionary of Slang, my go-to when researching the evolution of slutty language. 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 are no new entries into Green’s Dictionary of Slang. If there’s something else I know from my research, it’s that people loved to fuck during wartime. In fact the military was forced to implement sex ed during WWI after 18,000 servicemen came home per day from WWI with Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Imagine that many men getting the clap every single day?
People didn’t stop fucking during wartime historically, 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 what happens now? We’re living in uncertain times that seem to get more chaotic by the day. Will we invent new versions of “pile-driving” and “hiding the salami” or does that have to wait? Only time will tell what the next few years will bring for the evolution of language. In any case, I’m sure we’ll keep on fucking, just like we did in 1508.
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