More on "moist"

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, that "moist," for some people, might have the same sense as the
"wet" in "wet-in," thereby causing those people to avoid "moist" or
some such is a new departure for me. Must be a white thang. I don't
understand.

But, where language is concerned, one never knows, do one?

-Wilson


On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Arnold Zwicky<zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: More on "moist"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Aug 15, 2009, at 8:09 PM, Jon Lighter followed up on a report from
> George Thompson:
>>
>> Just so future ages (if any) be not misled about the history of humor.
>>
>> In 1974-75 my next-door neighbor observed that a girl who'd "had a
>> good time
>> on a date" could tell by flinging her panties against the wall. If
>> they
>> stuck, she'd had a good time.
>>
>> The word "moist" was not mentioned, IIRC.  As old-timey grammarians
>> say, it
>> was "understood."
>
> no, the *word* "moist" was not (necessarily) understood; what was
> understood was a reference to the wetness of female lust (as Alison
> Murie put it in a posting a while back).  as i pointed out in my
> posting on August 10 (where i reported on some counts of word use in
> sexual contexts), "wet" is more frequent than "moist" for such
> references, often hugely more frequent.
>
> a new set of searches, in raw ghits:
>   makes me wet  62,700
>   makes me moist  26,000
>
>   makes her wet  10,400
>   makes her moist  1,720
>
> (yes, there's a lot of noise here, but a great many of the hits are
> with reference to female sexual arousal.)
>
> so "moist" certainly does occur in these sexual contexts, but "wet" is
> the adjective that people pick more often -- possibly because, as a
> correspondent suggested to me back in 2007, people tend to avoid
> "moist", even in crude talk, as a result of its connotations as an
> "unpleasant" word.
>
> arnold
>
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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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