Choad/Chode--origin?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Sep 12 17:32:09 UTC 2003


>On 12 Sep 2003, at 8:20, James Smith wrote:
>
>>  Who are you trying to kid?  We're talking about
>>  hormone-crazed youth.
>
>Yeah, but these were hormone-crazed youth with a jones for the
>transcendant.  Would someone serious enough about eastern
>religion to have traveled all the way to India be inclined to use
>smutty street talk to describe the sex act?  It seems more likely to
>me that they'd go the euphemizing route.
>
>Of course, we can speculate and psychologize until the

[sacred]

>cows
>come home, but without solid linguistic backing it's all basically
>just an exercise in creating fantasy scenarios.  There needs to be
>something more than plausibility behind a hypothesis before the
>OED (or Merriam, or any reputable dictionary publisher) takes it
>seriously.
>
Indeed; an alternate equally wild-eyed (but more Occidental)
speculation would posit R. Crumb (or whoever) deriving it via a
spelling pronunciation of Fr. _chaud_.  Which I'm not endorsing.

larry



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