"rattle" = have sexual intercourse with, 2001

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:51 PM -0500 2/22/11, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
>  > >
>>  >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.

I've always thought, maybe incorrectly, that the OED type brackets
were used for marginal or possible instances of the relevant sense of
the item in a given entry, i.e. here if you can't tell from the
context whether "rattle" means 'fuck' or 'roger', but in this case my
understanding is that even though it is a sexual context, "rattle"
clearly has its ordinary value here ('move quickly or noisily') and
not its 20th century euphemistic one, for which lord knows there were
many expressions to choose in the 17th-19th c. era (cf. the several
pages worth provided by Farmer & Henley under "greens").

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

That I knew but had forgotten.  Qua Laurence-with-a-U, I understand the issue.

LH

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