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

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Mon Mar 13 06:31:58 UTC 2017


Wilson, I'm not sure I follow you 100%*, but isn't a plausible reading "get
a sudden erection"? Here I read "the notional governor of a man’s ability
to attain an erection" as being an imaginary string that pulls the penis up
and forward (never mind the frenum, which is on its underside: this is a
different sense). Then "popped my dick-string" could have originally meant
"pulled on that string so fast and hard that my dick popped right up", i.e.
"gave me a sudden erection", quite possibly visible as a bulge in the
pants.

While that doesn't work in your reported context--

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

--ISTM that if my postulated interpretation wasn't clear to hearers of the
phrase, it could have shifted in their use to the undefined usage you
describe.

* Not "I disagree", just "I don't quite follow the thread of your argument".

Mark


On Mar 12, 2017 5:04 PM, "Wilson Gray" wrote:

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.

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list