..happy endings..

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:20 PM -0400 8/6/02, GSCole wrote:
>In late May, in Lewes, Delaware, a massage therapist, when asked what
>she did toward ensuring her security on house calls, said that "for one
>thing, I don't do happy endings."  She further noted other security
>precautions.
>
>In a Google search, I found only a few references in which 'happy
>endings' is used in place of 'massage with release'.  I classify the
>phrase as slang.

This is also the motivation for the use of "therapeutic massage" as a
retronym (for what used to be called massage, i.e. the
sans-happy-ending kind)

>In a newspaper column by Maureen Dowd, titled Grainy film doesn't make
>it any cooler, which appeared in The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, PA), on 6
>AUG 2002, on p. A9, col. 5, there is a reference to a movie by Steven
>Soderbergh.  Dowd writes "One of Soderbergh's plot lines, a massage with
>a 'happy ending,' was already featured on two HBO shows, Larry David's
>and 'Mind of the Married Man.'"
>
>I presume that Dowd's column appeared in an earlier issue of the New
>York Times.

Yes, in Sunday's Week in Review (4 Aug.)

>==================
>
>Other words of possible interest, in the same column are:
>
>tadpoling -- older women dating younger men.

Popularized (as Dowd mentions) by a current film of (almost) the same
name, Tadpole.  I think it has to be older woman/boy (in this case,
of 15), pace Dowd's definition as above.


>
>porn name -- creating a name by using your middle name or pet's name and
>the name of the first street you lived on

That one has indeed been around for awhile, although I'd only heard
of it previously in the latter (pet's name) version.

--Velvet Fort Washington