"cunnilinctus" and the OED

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Tue Jul 9 01:45:08 UTC 2013


         At 7/8/2013 03:20 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>On Jul 8, 2013, at 1:15 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
> > At 7/8/2013 10:16 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >> So it was Legman who put the c*t in cunnilingus?
> >>
> >> LH
> >
> > Perhaps not.  Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex) does
> > not have ora- or oro- in any combination (or at least his index does
> > not).  But he does have an index entry for "cunnilinguis [sic] or
> > cunnilinctus" (each italicized).  I can't give a date, since the
> > edition I am looking at is 1936/37.  (Earlier copyrights listed in
> > that edition are 1906, 1910, and 1928.)
> >
> > OED2 has "cunnilingus" from Ellis's _Stud. Psychol. Sex_ in 1897 and
> > 1905 as its earliest two quotations.  It does not have an entry for
> > "cunnilinctus", but does have 3 distinct quotations, the earliest
> > 1930, for each of which it adds "[sic]".  Which I suppose is not a
> > moralistic judgement.
> >
> >
>Nor an ablaut present-tense variant of [suc].
>
>LH

To be serious, in this more-permissive age perhaps the OED can remove
the "[sic]" from the quotations and add an entry for "cunnilinctus",
since Ellis used it.  In the 1936/37/41/42 Random House Lifetime
Library edition:

II-2 (Vol. One, Part IV), 207:  "In addition to tribadism or
cunnilinctus, they [women preferring "inversion"] sometimes use an
ebony or ivory phallus ...".

II-2, 258:  "The extreme gratification is cunnilinctus, or oral
stimulation of the feminine sexual organs ...".

(This Part of Vol. One has an undated "Preface to the Third Edition".)

Joel

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list