when "intercourse" got funny

[Joel S. Berson]

At 9/29/2006 08:25 AM, JL wrote:
>Wikipedia relates that Intercourse, PA, didn't receive its current
>name till 1814.
>
>   For decades before that, it was "Cross Keys."
>
>   So, if Wiki is correct, "intercourse"  still must have been very
> unfunny in 1814.  At least to villagers in rural Pennsylvania.
>
>   People's minds have been provably in the gutter at least since
> Aristophanes (fl. 410 B.C.).  The present investigation seeks to
> discover when they dragged "intercourse" down with them.

Some time after 1850.  I've just met it several times in "The Scarlet
Letter;" for example (and there are others):

"In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that
made her feel as if she belonged to it."

"After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was
really of another character than it had previously been."

There is also "social intercourse":  "How soon--with what strange
rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of
social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words!"

Joel

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