"rattle" = have sexual intercourse with, 2001

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 02:55:01PM -0500, Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 2:31 PM -0500 2/22/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >At 2/22/2011 01:06 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:
> >>It shows up in George Macdonald Fraser's "Flashman" novels quite a bit,
> >
> >Found (probably with the desired meaning!) at least in "Flash for
> >Freedom!" (1972), e.g. page 453 in an Everyman's Library collection
> >(2010).  Seemingly not in "Flashman" (1969).
> >
> >>along with "rogering".
> >>They were written in the 20th century, set in the 19th.
> >
> >Does that mean we should find "rattle" in 19th-century books or slang
> >dictionaries?  However, my personal memory of  "rogering" is from the
> >18th century.
> >
> >Joel
>
> _ro(d)ger_ is in Farmer & Henley as both a substantive 'the penis' (<
> 1653, Urquhart's trans. of Rabelais) and a verb "to copulate' (< 1750)
>
> _rattle_ isn't there with any relevant meaning (just 'talk or move
> quickly or noisily', 'censure, irritate').  The move from 'move
> quickly' to the relevant meaning is certainly plausible enough, but
> not yet attested in Victorian times if F&H can be trusted.

It's also not in _My Secret Life_, which has, well, a lot of this sort
of thing.

The earliest in GDoS is 1966 for the verb; there are 17th- and
18th-century bracketed examples (showing the word used in sexual
contexts) for both noun and verb, though.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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