"rattle" = have sexual intercourse with, 2001

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 03:35:54PM -0500, Laurence Horn wrote:
> 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.

...which is why the quote is in brackets in the dictionary--sexual
context, but not actually showing the use of this sense of the word.

(And it's "Jonathon", by the way.)

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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