[Ads-l] Antedating of "blow job"

[Mark Mandel]

English, too, has a gender-neutral verb for oral sex: "give head".

MAM

On Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 2:58 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> Speaking of wind instruments...
>
> French may be among relatively few languages that sport a transitive verb
> underspecified for the meaning 'perform oral sex on', where the object can
> denote a female or male individual. Standard glosses are exemplified by
> those in the OED, "To practise fellatio or cunnilingus on or with (a
> person)" for the verb and "An act of fellatio or cunnilingus" for the
> derived nominalization. The origin is unknown (barring a fanciful
> derivation), but there are two curiosities about Farmer & Henley's cite:
> (1) the main entry is given as _gamaruche_, although _gamahuche_ is given
> as a variant (orthographically speaking)
> (2) it cross-references "to bag-pipe"--this is where the wind instrument
> comes into play, but checking F&H's entry for that verb, we are told only
> that it's
>
> "A lascivious practice; too indecent to mention"
>
> Curious, since the practice (or practices) in question ("to irrumate", "to
> cunnilinge") is mentioned under the _gamaruche_ entry, not to mention the
> degree of indecentness mentioned elsewhere by F&H.  Also the non-definition
> is given for a noun form but it's the verb that's being left undefined.
> It's as if they were too busy fanning their faces at the indecorous item to
> even notice the discrepancy.
>
> Seriously, though, I wonder if there's independent evidence that F&H grew
> bolder with their glosses as they moved from Vol. I (1890) (hosting "to
> bag-pipe") to Vol. III (1893) (hosting "gama{r/h}uche") and beyond.
>
> LH
>
>
>

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