[Ads-l] Antedating of "blow job"

[Laurence Horn]

well, a transitive verb phrase, not a verb

On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 9:04 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>

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