[Ads-l] "_pop_ my dick-string"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Mar 12 21:03:50 UTC 2017


When I was a kid, back in StL, _pop_ as a slang term occurred only in the
phrase,

"_pop_ my dick-string"

which phrase itself occurred only in the boyz-in-the-'hood brag,

"That pussy [was] so good [that it] made me pop my dick-string!"

Though I heard this phrase easily thousands of times from ca.1945 to
ca.1952, when its use died out in StL, I was never able to winkle out its
meaning. Clearly, _pop_ means "break [half in two]," but I didn’t know what
a "dick-string" was or what, exactly, happened when you were made to pop
yours as a consequence of getting some primo good. When I got old enough
that my potnaz started to use the phrase and I *still* didn’t understand
the meaning of the key-word, _dick-string_, I finally had to aks [actually,
in the StL BE of my day, _ask_ was pronounced "ass," in casual speech]
somebody what a "dick-string" was.

And nobody knew. People answered the question, but they were clearly only
shuckin’ ’n’ jivin’. There’s no part of a dick that can be called a
"string" and the only environment in which the term was used precluded any
metaphorical interpretation. That is, "made me pop my dick-string" couldn’t
mean, "caused me to come to climax" aut sim.

Just for laughs, I eyeballed the World’s Greatest Slang Lexicon, Green’s,
and found

dickstring (n.) [SE string, i.e. lit. the frenum]
1. (US black) the notional governor of a man’s ability to attain an
erection. 1967

Wow! Nobody ever explained it to me that way, before! Unfortunately, though
erudite, this definition of _dickstring_ is unavailable as a means of
interpreting the phrase, "pop my dick-string."

At this point, having saved the best for last, I turned to HDAS, wherein I
found,

dick-string . . . a man’s ability to get or maintain an erection. ca.1965
et passim.

Clearly, the dick-string of days of yore in StL, which occurred only in the
fixed phrase, "pop my dick-string" has no connection with the dick-string
of other times and other places.

-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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



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