the birds and the bees

[George Thompson]

This message got sent by accident, incomplete.

JL has replied off-list with a citation from a newspaper of 1939.

I had made an insincere effort to search the Proquest historical newspapers
-- it's not my idea of fun --but saw nothing likely within 50 years of the
introduction of the concept of pollination (through the 1920s).  JL's
citation and another I had found but not noted, but from roughly the same
era, suggest that the trope was well-known by then.
My notion of this trope is that the little one is invited to remember seeing
mommy hen sitting on her eggs (or mommy robin, or mommy pigeon, if
hen-houses are not part of the kid's experience), well, those eggs
developed. . . .  And what got those eggs started? well, just as the little
bee flies to a flower and gathers up pollen. . . .
So the bees wouldn't have entered the story before the late 19th C.
 Colonial parents might have wised up their kids by referring to birds,
though.

The TLS article has a nice story about Noel Coward, who was with a child
when they saw a pair of dogs copulating.  "What are they doing, Uncle Noel?"
(or words to that effect).  Coward explained that the dog in front was blind
and the other was pushing it to St. Dunstan's.

GAT


> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:37 AM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu
> > wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
>> Subject:      the birds and the bees
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> There is a long essay/review in last week's (I think) TLS on an exhibit at
>> a
>> London Museum on sexual behavior in man and in other animals.  In the
>> course
>> of the review, the writer alludes to "the birds and the bees" as the
>> parental launching pad for enlightening a child about sex.  Oddly, the
>> writer has the notion that the bees get into the story because of the
>> sex-life of the swarm -- the single female queen pursued by the bunch of
>> hrny males, the drones and the worker bees, and so forth.
>>
>> I note that the expression is not in the OED.  It does appear from the OED
>> that knowledge of the process of pollination reached the English-speaking
>> world in 1873, which is liely to be the terminus
>>
>> --
>> George A. Thompson
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>> Univ.
>> Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org