missionary position

[jester at PANIX.COM]

>
> I don't find "missionary position" in RHHDAS.  Anybody have any
> information as to the earliest appearance of the phrase or of the
> veracity or otherwise of the legend that explains it?  (The legend
> being that it was so called by Pacific Islanders, since the
> missionaries were trying to coerce them into abandoning all other
> postures and fornicating in that position exclusively.)  I'm sure
> that I had heard it before 1971.
>

We didn't consider the phrase "missionary position" to be
slang. In any case, Barry Popik has recently posted several
messages with increasingly early examples of the phrase, going
back to the mid-1960s. However I have since discovered a 1948
example which does, indeed, attribute the phrase to Trobriand
Islanders who used it to describe the sexual position used
by English and American missionaries.

Jesse Sheidlower
Oxford English Dictionary