when "intercourse" got funny

[Laurence Horn]

>At 9/29/2006 08:25 AM, JL wrote:
>>Wikipedia relates that Intercourse, PA, didn't receive its current
>>name till 1814.
>>
>>   For decades before that, it was "Cross Keys."
>>
>>   So, if Wiki is correct, "intercourse"  still must have been very
>>unfunny in 1814.  At least to villagers in rural Pennsylvania.
>>
>>   People's minds have been provably in the gutter at least since
>>Aristophanes (fl. 410 B.C.).  The present investigation seeks to
>>discover when they dragged "intercourse" down with them.
>
>Some time after 1850.  I've just met it several times in "The Scarlet
>Letter;" for example (and there are others):
>
>"In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that
>made her feel as if she belonged to it."
>
>"After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
>clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was
>really of another character than it had previously been."
>
>There is also "social intercourse":  "How soon--with what strange
>rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of
>social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words!"
>
>Joel

I'm not sure "social intercourse" is beyond the pale even now.  I
just noticed it in a Ruth Rendell detective novel from a few years
ago--the context can still rescue it from narrowing, as in those
"baiser la main de" examples I mentioned, or "weathercock",
"jackass", and so on.  The opposite effect obtains in the cases we've
been discussing of "carnal knowledge" or "criminal conversation".
(Granted, the last is pretty obscure outside of legal contexts, but
there was an Ed McBain novel with that title that had the relevant
('illicit [non-social] intercourse') intended reference.)

LH

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