sources and flying fuck

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/18/2008 03:30 PM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>An interesting note is found in a recent book
>called A Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through Love and Sex, which
>finds "flying
>fuck" in an 18th century poem; that use, though, is is not in the
>modern sense of
>"ridiculously impossible undertaking--hence something worthless," but more in
>the sense of The Mile High Club (but, it being the 18th century, the
>copulators were apparently on horseback), which the authors
>mistakenly take to be the
>20th century meaning.

This, I suppose, is related to "flying coach", here applied to the
horse.  "Flying coach" is perhaps the earliest attachment of "flying"
in the sense of fast to some noun.  (Based on OED2, where "flying
coach" is from 1548, a full century before any other phrase quoted in
flying ppl.a. sense 4.)

Joel

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