Precise Citation for Major Antedating of Euphemistic Sense of "Make Love"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Actually I was thinking exactly the same thing that Larry suggests here, after I sent this email last night.  I now have concluded that this 1883 citation is very likely in the old sense of flirting or foreplay.  Of the almost 100 other occurrences of "make love" or "made love" or "making love" in pre-1927 legal cases, none of them seems at all to be in the sense of sexual intercourse.  The 1883 citation is thus "too good to be true" and can easily be read to mean that the defendant came on to the woman as a preliminary to gratifying his animal desires.  The context is one of ultimately having intercourse but "make love" does not refer to the act of intercourse.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Laurence Horn [laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 11:03 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Precise Citation for Major Antedating of Euphemistic Sense of "Make Love"

I can imagine a plausible reading here where the writer intended "try to seduce" (as in the earlier sense) rather than "have sex with".  A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but consistent with the older meaning ('To pay amorous attention to'):  Prompted by the goal of gratifying his animal desires, he made love to her and made love to her and finally broke down her resistance.

LH


On Aug 22, 2014, at 10:03 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:

> make love (OED, s.v. love, n.1 P.3(b), 1927)
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> 1883 _Kentucky Opinions_ 12: 21 (1915) [case of Clark v. Phillips]  As a defense to the action he pleaded that she was an unchaste woman, and the fact that she had given birth to an illegitimate child would have been sufficient to authorize the jury to find for him, unless it had been shown that the gratification of his own animal desires prompted him to make love to this confiding and unfortunate girl.
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> Fred Shapiro
>
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