"rattle" = have sexual intercourse with, 2001

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:46 PM -0500 2/22/11, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>At 2/22/2011 01:06 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>>>
>>>>The 2001 movie "The Banger Sisters" regularly uses the verb "rattle"
>>>>= "have sexual intercourse with" (although not often does it use this
>  >>>euphemism) and the corresponding noun "rattle".
>  >>>
>>>>Not in the OED,  nor Wentworth & Flexner (1967) or Chapman (1995),
>>>>the only slang books on my shelf.
>>>
>>>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).
>
>Green's Dictionary of Slang has it from 1966, in Trimble's _5000 Adult
>Sex Words and Phrases_. GDoS also includes a bracketed quote from
>1661, from a bawdy poem about the rattling of buttocks:
>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=vCpLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA82
>
No offense to Jonathan, but it looks to me as though _rattle_ in this
context ("he made her old buttocks to rattle") means 'rattle', not
'have sex with' or anything of the sort, even though the context is
that of having sex.

LH

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