new word alert

[Gareth Branwyn]

"Clit mouse" has been around for years. It was submitted to the Jargon Watch
column in Nov. '96 by someone at Stanford.

I never brought myself to submit it to Wired at the time*, but have used it
ever since and have heard it frequently used by others.


---------------------------
Gareth Branwyn
Jargon Watch Editor
Wired

* My editor at the time was a very politically correct sort who never wanted
to publish anything that might be construed as sexist. I submitted another
term around this time, AssGrabber, which I really wanted to use. AOL had
just released a program called FileGrabber which allowed you to assemble
multi-part newsgroup image files at the touch of a button. Since the only
real purpose of this utility was assembling porno, the name nearly instantly
became AssGrabber. This was a time when AOL was proclaiming how "family
friendly" it was, so I found this tech (and the resultant slang) particular
interesting (again, since there was little other use for it, which AOL was
surely aware of). I also found it interesting that my editor thought the
term was sexist. There was (and still is) a huge gay porn presence online,
so I don't know why he assumed the gender of the ass being grabbed. He was
not the editor of the Jargon Watch book, so I was able to use this term and
several others that he had censored.

> From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 15:06:34 -0400
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: new word alert
>
> (Damn, that's weird...)
>
> My 23-year-old daughter and I were working with my laptop computer, which has
> in
> lieu of a mouse one of those things that look like a pencil eraser between the
> G
> and H keys. I called it an "eraserhead". She says that none of her friends
> call
> it anything but a "clitmouse". !!!
>
> What's weird is that I found myself very reluctant to put that wonderful word
> in
> the subject line, even though I have no problem discussing it in the message.
> Oh, oh, old fogeyhood is catching up with me.
>
> -- Mark
>
> Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist & Manager of Acoustic Data
> Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Dragon Systems, Inc.
> 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
> (speaking only for myself)
>