Blue Balls

[JohnPatrick]

Wilson Gray wrote: 
As I noted, I first heard a reference to "blue balls" in 1950, though
I didn't discover its meaning till years later. IME, the use is rare
among all speakers and absolutely *never* used by black speakers. I
was, therefore, surprised to hear the term used by a black speaker on
a recording from 1934 and find it trivially interesting that this term
appears to have vanished from the vocabulary of today's black
speakers.

BTW, if you're white and have heard black speakers use the term,
please be aware that your very presence on the scene renders the scene
totally artificial.

 The most realistic version of black speech isto be found in
neo-blaxploitation movies, featuring black actors that most people,
including your humble correspondent. Naturally, I realize that the
experience of others may be different.

I find the implied suggestion that the singer's reference was not to a
case of lover's nuts, but to a case of clap to be annoyingly racist
and totally unfounded.
  The term "blue-balls" as a reference to venereal disease has been found among African-Americans.  See Roger Abrahams' _Deep Down in the Jungle_ page 171.  Abrahams got all of the poems from African-Americans and some of the poems were collected by leaving the tape recorder alone while people drank and recorded themselves.   I 

Jane went to the big city,
She tacked as sign up on the door.
"Two cents a ride, four cents a trip."
They came in twos, they came in fours.
To be correct, they came in scores.
There even was a guy named Traps
Who had the claps,
The siphs and the blue-balls, too.
He even got a piece of that old pooh-pooh.


See the full poem here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vWrkKV-BSQ8C&pg=PA171&dq=toasts++blue-balls&client=firefox-a


.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org