CANDY and JUNK

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

I THOUGHT I'd mentioned this a number of years ago, but a check of the
archives tells me otherwise.

In recent months I've noticed a growing use of the term "junk" to indicate
male genitalia. (I heard it last night in the most recent SouthPark episode, for
example.) I've also heard "candy" used with a the identical referent (on a
recent segment of RuPaul's Drag Race).

What strikes me as lexicographically weird about these terms is that I first
noticed them used in this way in a short story by Ethan Mordden, in his 1999
collection entitled _I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore: Tales from Gay
Manhattan_. As I recall, the speaker was the owner if a male brothel in
Texas, speaking to a prospective sex worker. The terms were specialized: JUNK
referred to the penis-and-testicles (what I often hear referred to today as one's
BOYS); CANDY referred to the anus (or maybe it was the other way around).

I had never heard these usages, so I wrote to Mordden and asked him about
them. He said he had just "made them up."

It seems to me that it is unlikely that this rather obscure short story
should have had such an impact on adolescent American culture. Maybe the terms just
percolated in gay culture for years--inspired by Mordden, who has been pretty
popular in gay culture--and then made the crossover? Maybe Mordden was
particularly clever in choosing terms that had not actually come into use but were
so "right" that eventually folks invented them independently?

I find a 2003 earliest definition on URBAN DICTIONARY, which would be about
right for the theory that Mordden's invention was actually the source. I don't
find CANDY though, in the specific sense of 'genitalia'.

Anybody have a clue?


**************
Need a job? Find employment help in your
area. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&
ncid=emlcntusyelp00000005)

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