when "intercourse" got funny

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:48 AM -0700 9/27/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>...
>   b) since the sexual sense was the only one
>they knew, they would be laughing nervously with
>embarrassment, surprise, puzzlement, etc.
>Witnessing this could confirm onlookers in the
>belief that "now" the word "really" had a sexual
>meaning only; all but the bravest would then
>desist from using it in other contexts, thus
>making the sexual sense even more primary.
>
>   This hasn't happened with "congress" because
>the governmental sense is predominant enough to
>keep the word from narrowing.  One might
>contrast the career of "occupy," which
>eighteenth-cenury writers allegedly began
>avoiding in droves because it had become
>sexualized; there was no social counterbalance
>to keep the word innocent.  But eventually
>everybody forgot the sexual meaning, which seems
>remarkable in itself.
>...

Not just "occupy" but "know"/"knowledge", which
escaped any fatal tainting from "the Biblical
sense", although that sense can emerge with the
right context or modification ("carnal ___").
Another interesting pattern of taboo avoidance is
that exemplified by Fr. "baiser", which became
unusable in its original sense ('kiss') as a
transitive verb with an personal object once it
developed into a euphemism for 'fuck', but
retains its innocence with appropriate objects
("baiser la main") or as a noun ("un baiser"), so
that the 'to kiss' is rendered either by the
locution "donner un baiser à" or by the
now-strengthened "embrasser" (originally
'embrace, hug').  It would be an elegant cyclical
pattern if "foutre" had come to mean 'to hug',
but it doesn't seem to work that way...

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org