hoop (v) "allusive of copulation" -- not in OED?

[Joel S. Berson]

 From a list devoted to the 18th century:

>The phrase "hoop her barrel" appears in a song in Charles Coffey's play, The
>Devil to Pay (1731). The word "hoop" is included in Gordon Williams's A
>Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart
>Literature, Volume 1 (Continuum, 1994), pp. 677-678. His definition is
>"allusive of copulation" (though in The Devil to Pay, he notes that the word
>in the phrase "hoop her barrel" refers to "wife-beating"). He gives a few
>examples of sexual uses of the term (and related phrases) in
>seventeenth-century works (e.g. "In an Amorous heat with a Cooper she's
>gone, / Who will hoop her Tubb stoutly before he is done" - Wheel-Wrights
>Huy-and-Cry, 1693).


Joel

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