the birds and the bees

[Garson O'Toole]

Here is a 1922 citation that sardonically links "the birds, the bees
and the flowers" to learning about sex. Note, this instance of "The
Blue Lagoon" predates Brooke Shields.

Cite: 1922 July, The Smart Set, Portrait of a Theatrical Season by
George Jean Nathan, Page 133, [Ess Ess Pub. Co.] Smart set Company,
New York. (Google Books full view)
http://books.google.com/books?id=0y0cAAAAIAAJ&q=bees#v=snippet&

<Begin excerpt>
"The Blue Lagoon," by H. DeVere Stacpoole.--The boy and girl brought
up on the deserted island who learn the secrets of sex from the birds,
the bees and the flowers. In bed at 9:45.
<End excerpt>

Garson

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:04 PM, 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:      Re: the birds and the bees
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>

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