"rattle" = have sexual intercourse with, 2001

[Victor Steinbok]

Hmm... What about the whole phrase "rattle her buttocks"? Would it ever
have been used in its /literal/ sense? Wouldn't the whole chunk be a
euphemism? Of course, this does not make an immediate jump to sexual
meaning for "rattle", but, surely, it's more than just buttocks that
could have been rattled in this expression. At least, this would get you
to "rattle her X", from which moving to just plain "rattle" is much
easier... Just a thought.

     VS-)

On 2/22/2011 4:28 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 3:51 PM -0500 2/22/11, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>> ...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").

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