Titty, Cock, Intercourse and Ejaculation
June 26, 2015 7:56 AM   Subscribe

 
her 1930 story The School by the River she wrote: “The Principal allowed the girls much liberty, but intercourse with the men from the Academia was strictly forbidden, and any girl who transgressed this rule, and was found out more than once, was sent away.” Use of the word intercourse with reference to sexual activity has been current since 1798, so 1930 seems quite late for Brent-Dyer still to be using it in its original sense.

Maybe it's my dirty mind, or my unfamiliarity with the source material, but are we sure this use of intercourse was not intentional? I'm having a difficult time accepting that this is a mere innocent and unfortunate choice of word.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:02 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Indeed, almost all of these examples seem to be intentionally doubling the entendre.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.


Come on, Grauniad. you're either trolling or trolled.
posted by chavenet at 8:16 AM on June 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


I purchased a rooster from a friend's wife this week here in Cote d'Ivoire. It was a very big rooster, large enough for the 9 people planning on eating dinner together to be able to consume it happily.

It was very hard to keep a straight face when discussing Le Grand Coq de Madame Odile which we were about to eat.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:18 AM on June 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Oh, looking for unintentional double entendres are we?
posted by eriko at 8:22 AM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


It is unthinkable that either had any idea of another possible reading of what they had written

People can handle multiple meanings without a crisis -- ass can mean both donkey and butt, and can be used in ways that are unequivocally one alone or that play on the double meaning. I doubt that the writers quoted were so foolish as to not be aware of this.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:24 AM on June 26, 2015


Mandatory Fry And Laurie (SLYT) including use of 'felching' before everyone knew what it was.

Further mandatory Fry And Laurie (SLYT)

Stuff like this is why many over here can't take Hugh seriously as 'House'. Keep expecting it to break into a sketch.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:35 AM on June 26, 2015 [12 favorites]


I seem to remember there was less classroom titters and more a discussion on how the use of languages changes over time when we did The War Of The Worlds in English and we read this bit:

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.

Though we were relatively advanced in our schooling... reading the 'stump' scene in Shane a year or so before saw the lesson totally collapse in not so suppressed mirth.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:36 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I came to roll my eyes...and left guffawing. Neat little article!
posted by Jody Tresidder at 8:37 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Meanwhile there's was this classic psychobilly album Big Cock.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:37 AM on June 26, 2015


Butts lol
posted by The Whelk at 8:40 AM on June 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


I saw a pair of beautiful brown boobies bobbing in the ocean when I went snorkling in Costa Rica a few years ago. I had fun telling my SO about the experience (she wasn't able to join me on the trip), but I assured her I'd taken plenty of pictures and that I'd share with her when I returned home.
posted by tempestuoso at 8:48 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Question on QI: "What did Watson do twice as often as Holmes?"
posted by Zack_Replica at 8:48 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Mandatory Fry And Laurie (SLYT)

I'll see you and raise you a mandatory Kids in the Hall (SLYT).
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:01 AM on June 26, 2015


"We're not going to use magic?" Ron ejaculated loudly.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 9:05 AM on June 26, 2015




I've been reading Little Women to my spouse lately, as she missed it during childhood, and we've had our moments of giggling--just last night, because Meg wished she had "gay friends" and Amy "couldn't find her rubbers."
posted by dlugoczaj at 9:14 AM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified.

I think this gets close to it. I think the context of the conversation probably played a bigger role than it does now. Depending on whom you were talking to, when, where, under what circumstances, and who else was around, you'd be more likely to understand that they were saying "cock" as in "rooster" rather than as in "penis." A kind of code-switching, as it were.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:15 AM on June 26, 2015


Maybe it's my dirty mind, or my unfamiliarity with the source material, but are we sure this use of intercourse was not intentional? I'm having a difficult time accepting that this is a mere innocent and unfortunate choice of word.

Yeah, it's your unfamiliarity. If, like me, you live in the world of C18th and C19th literature, the use of "intercourse" in this sense is so far and away the predominant one that there really is no frisson whatsoever of the alternative meaning. It's like the use of "gay" in works written in the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, the double entendre was available to those in the know, but in the vast, vast majority of uses it's entirely unthought of.

The fact is that puns are easy and few words in English (or any other natural language) have stolidly univocal meanings. We always rely on charitable reading (in the technical sense) to be understood (something 6 out of the 9 members of the Supreme Court appreciated in their reading of the ACA recently!).

As for Swallows and Amazons, in particular, I--for one--am really disappointed with this stupid decision. Yeah, sure, there'd be a little sniggering (or tittering) over Titty's name by the uninitiated for the first few minutes of the first episode. But after they'd heard the name four or five times it would just become "that person's name." There are lots of "funny names" out there in the real world (witness the various birds that are Tits or Boobies etc) but that doesn't make it impossible for nature documentaries or news reporters or whatever to talk about them without the audience losing their minds. Somehow you can sign a byline with "Cockburn" and the world still continues to turn. Titty should have been allowed to keep her name.
posted by yoink at 9:17 AM on June 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Maybe it's my dirty mind, or my unfamiliarity with the source material, but are we sure this use of intercourse was not intentional? I'm having a difficult time accepting that this is a mere innocent and unfortunate choice of word.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing a lot of people making the distinction by saying "social intercourse" and "sexual intercourse."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:22 AM on June 26, 2015


More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

Someone please make a rhyming Dr. Seuss / Critique My Dick Pic crossover site.
posted by zeptoweasel at 9:30 AM on June 26, 2015


I doubt you can write a sentence that does not contain something that could be construed as a double entendre. If you know what I mean.
posted by straight at 9:34 AM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]



Rule #34 of Life: all entendres are double.
 
posted by Herodios at 9:41 AM on June 26, 2015


I doubt you can write a sentence that does not contain something that could be construed as a double entendre. If you know what I mean.

Indeed. That's what makes a lot of the "bawdy in [Insert Famous Author]" studies so tedious. If you push on every word in a text to see if some potentially bawdy meaning was associated with it by somebody at the time of writing you're going to get lots and lots of hits. But you really need more than that for it to make an interesting reading. It has to make some sense in the context. I remember hearing a paper once on bawdy in Jane Austen where a reference to curtains being "well hung" was taken to imply that the speaker was thinking about what a massive cock (no, the other kind) some young man had. And, you know, if Austen wanted to play that game I'm entirely prepared to believe she could. But when you read the passage in context it just makes no sense, at all, for that character to be understood to be thinking that way. Her interest in the curtains is intended precisely as evidence of her obliviousness to anything but trivial matters of domestic detail. To understand her as an earthy, sexual being who can't stop thinking about what's going on under people's clothes is to completely destroy the character that Austen has created.
posted by yoink at 9:50 AM on June 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Amy "couldn't find her rubbers."

When I was in school in England in the early 80s, I had someone ask me for a rubber (pencil eraser) during an exam and I gawped for a minute, literally with the mouth-hanging-open thing, until I figured out what she wanted. More from shock at the idea that a high-school-aged girl would have a condom on her person during an exam than at the possible double-entendre.

I used to see things like this all the time when I was young, though. The Baptist church/school in my hometown that advertised "Gay Bible School" in the 80s and did not mean for LGBT folks, the social vs sexual intercourse someone mentioned above, and so on. I also had a classmate whose unfortunate surname was Glasscock and who now has apparently changed his name to Glassco. I get the reasons for doing it, but you'd like to think the poor guy wasn't so agitated about other people's sniggering at his name that he felt like he needed to.
posted by immlass at 9:52 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Read the article to see Watson ejaculate, was not disappointed.

When I was in school in England in the early 80s, I had someone ask me for a rubber (pencil eraser) during an exam and I gawped for a minute

In early 80's Canada it was the same thing except no one called erasers "rubbers" unless you were specifically making the double-entendre joke. And man, there were three or four boys in every class who thought that it was the funniest thing ever. They'd say "rubber" over and over, day after day.
posted by GuyZero at 10:18 AM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


A woman walks into a bar and orders a Double Entendre. So the bartender gave her one.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:11 AM on June 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


A woman walks into a bar and orders a Double Entendre.

So the bartender GIVES IT TO HER. *punches fist towards ground*
posted by GuyZero at 11:27 AM on June 26, 2015 [7 favorites]


The ones I really wonder about are Fanny Assingham and Fanny Hurter in Henry James. Surely intentional but given his by then ambiguous nationality, did his Fanny have British English or American English overtones?
posted by Mocata at 11:35 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


“An old pussy,” said Miss Marple to herself. “Yes, I can see I'm quite recognisable as an old pussy. There are so many old pussies, and they're all so much alike."

-- Agatha Christie (age 91) in Nemesis
posted by fredludd at 11:43 AM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


You see, before the late 1960's, there was this thing called "not thinking about sex every waking moment," and some people actually did it sometimes! And they weren't considered freaks! Can you believe it?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:54 PM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


No, I can't, because no, there wasn't.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:32 PM on June 26, 2015 [12 favorites]


I'm with The Underpants Monster.* Articles like The Guardian one say far more about our own sex-obsessed age than the supposed naivety of earlier generations.

* There's a sentence I hadn't expected to type today.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:40 PM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


No, I can't, because no, there wasn't

It is true there was never a time when people weren't fascinated by sex--but it is definitely a "new thing" in the late C19th and after for people to be so taken with the potential sexual significance of ostensibly non-sex-related texts. The whole post-Freudian thing of discovering sexual implications boiling beneath the surface of even the most anodyne texts just doesn't exist in, say, the C18th. There is a version of that kind of paranoid hermeneutics, of course, but it's more along the lines of filling in the unspoken implications of a given scene (young man and young woman are left alone in dark leafy bower without chaperone...you just KNOW that they got up to SOMETHING) than it is to do with pressing for potential double meanings or symbolic potential in the words and images as given ("oh, his sword was longer than all other knights' swords. Pfffffft. We know what that means.")
posted by yoink at 3:14 PM on June 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


The whole post-Freudian thing of discovering sexual implications boiling beneath the surface of even the most anodyne texts just doesn't exist in, say, the C18th.

I buy that there wasn't so much serious attention paid to sexual implications before Freud. Given how much intentional double entendre is in Shakespeare alone I find it hard to believe that people didn't catch on to unintentional ones. Aren't most of these retroactive ones just from changes in word use and meaning anyway?

As for "not being obsessed with sex before the 1960s, come on.
posted by atoxyl at 3:49 PM on June 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yes, of course. But put that in context. It wasn't mainstream literature. It wasn't what every single person was reading.You wouldn't be considered some kind of weirdo if you haven't read it or something like it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:52 PM on June 26, 2015


10 of Shakespeare's Best Dirty Jokes, including this gem:

8. TITUS ANDRONICUS: ACT 4, SCENE 2

CHIRON
Thou hast undone our mother.
AARON
Villain, I have done thy mother.

OH SNAP.

But I think there's a difference between a double entendre and the Freudian approach of looking for subtext in regular speech. But certainly the English had sex on the mind pretty often from what I recall of reading capital-R Romantic poetry in high school.
posted by GuyZero at 3:56 PM on June 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


It wasn't mainstream literature. It wasn't what every single person was reading.You wouldn't be considered some kind of weirdo if you haven't read it or something like it.

Nobody would dispute that the norms in literature and public conversation have changed. What i'm suggesting is that from material that violates those norms one can glimpse an expanded picture of what people were thinking and some of that's pretty salacious.
posted by atoxyl at 4:03 PM on June 26, 2015


There are lots of "funny names" out there in the real world (witness the various birds that are Tits or Boobies etc) but that doesn't make it impossible for nature documentaries or news reporters or whatever to talk about them without the audience losing their minds.

I am sure that many a school project on animal communication has been enhanced by a sideline on how in the 1930s, birds of the species parus major passed on a useful trick to their cousins across the Channel. I will let wikipedia break the news:
In England, great tits learned to break the foil caps of milk bottles delivered at the doorstep of homes to obtain the cream at the top.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:30 PM on June 26, 2015


The was a book and play by Cornelia Otis Skinner titled When Our Hearts Were Young And Gay. My high school put on the play, circa 1962. I imagine the title would disqualify it now.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:34 PM on June 26, 2015


There's a difference between "thinking about sex every waking moment" and "thinking about sex every time someone mentions a word that you associate with sex because language has changed."



And further to the point that people thought about sex before the 1960s:
Song from 1931 about a cat
She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor
posted by RobotHero at 5:14 PM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Riker flirtation tip: It's possible to make a double entendre out of any statement, although it's often hard.
posted by Pronoiac at 5:41 PM on June 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yes, of course. But put that in context. It wasn't mainstream literature. It wasn't what every single person was reading.You wouldn't be considered some kind of weirdo if you haven't read it or something like it.

Yes, because censorship. Riddle me this: Why was censorship so very necessary?
posted by Sys Rq at 7:23 PM on June 26, 2015


(or, you know, deemed to be so)
posted by Sys Rq at 7:49 PM on June 26, 2015


A colleague, and this is not a joke, once wrote unwittingly (in a musicological article about the construction of historical pipe organs):

"Three men worked in the church on the erection of an enormous organ."

(He was told to maybe re-write).


[and when looking at historical treatises about playing the flute I don't even ]
posted by Namlit at 11:44 PM on June 26, 2015


This reminds me of my experience researching a Yorkshire family. My quest terminated in a lady surnamed Dickburn with no apparent relatives. I searched far and wide, reading transcriptions of parish registers now lost, desperately trying to find some antecedents. I even contemplated the possibility that a deliberate or accidental double entendre had caused her name to be mistranscribed from Cockburn. Yes, snigger all you want.

I think it was that double meaning that had blinded me to the meaning of Dick-burn. A "burn" is a spring or fountain, or the water flowing from it. But how did the Dick- fit in? I pored over maps of the area, and nothing by that name stuck out. Quite fortuitously, I found a "Dick-" somewhere else. It turns out that "dick" is a dialect transcription of dyke, so her name meant a stream coming from a mound or the furrow associated with it. She was a Dyke-, not a Dick-; no wonder my search for Dicks had been fruitless.

Anyway, my point is that smutty thinking can infest even a pure art like genealogy.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:29 AM on June 27, 2015


Lake Titicaca
posted by ostranenie at 8:57 AM on June 27, 2015


> My quest terminated in a lady surnamed Dickburn

Now I know why her ex-boyfriend Dave
Calls her Mrs. Microwave

> no wonder my search for Dicks had been fruitless.

Google Image Search does not disappoint in this regard.
posted by ostranenie at 8:59 AM on June 27, 2015


a book and play by Cornelia Otis Skinner titled When Our Hearts Were Young And Gay


When you're with the Flintstones . . .
 
posted by Herodios at 9:03 AM on June 27, 2015


I didn't think I needed to spell it out, but I guess I can if I need to.

There's a difference between A: some people having sex on their minds 100% of the time, and general audiences having sex on their minds in some contexts but not in others; and B: sex being the assumed default context for all art, literature, and other forms of media and communication for everybody, without exception, in every context, every single time, world without end, amen.

There's a difference between A: a word having both a sexual meaning and a non-sexual meaning, general audiences understanding without being told that when the word is used in a sexual context (dirty joke, naughty book, bawdy song, ribald scene in a play, bedroom farce, etc.) the word's sexual meaning is intended, and when it's used in a non-sexual context its non-sexual meaning is intended (the Jane Austen example mentioned above is a good example), with everybody except the oversexed and the immature being able to code-switch; and B: the current situation in which such a word's sexual meaning is always assumed to bie its primary meaning, no matter what the context.

The current situation is also one in which modern readers refuse to accept Watson's declaration of Holmes's asexuality in "A Scandal in Bohemia." He says in black and white that to be a lover was against Homes's nature - if he's an unreliable narrator about that, we might as well throw the whole canon out the window.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:35 AM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jane Austen made at least one filthy pun, which she telegraphed. It's not at all unlikely that there are more. For instance, I have the gravest suspicions about the "white soup" passage in Pride and Prejudice.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:34 PM on June 27, 2015


Jane Austen made at least one filthy pun, which she telegraphed.

In Oliver Twist, the number of times Dickens (ooh—er!) refers to the Artful Dodger's BFF as "Master Bates" (often to hails of uproarious laughter from the fellow himself) is significantly greater than one.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:01 PM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


The following little story can be found in the article's comments (note to Americans: in British English, "fanny" refers to what I've also heard called "lady front bottom"):
I remember in my youth how one day on a farm my sister shouted "wow, look at this enormous cock!" needless to say I came quickly.

Unfortunately in my eagerness I bumped into Dick who showered cream all over my face.

"Oh no!" he cried, that was for Fanny now what will I do? She is in the field with old man Winkle picking strawberries she will be most disappointed.

"It's ok, I have a cunning plan" whispering in Dicks ear we raced to the shed and gave old Gerty a good tugging "hrnf, this is hard work" said Dick. "Keep tugging" I said, we'll have cream in no time!

"Ahhh" said Dick, "we've filled a whole bucket, it weighs a ton, that should be enough... Lets go!".

As we race from the shed we could hear Gerty mooing in the background.

We finally arrived together, but we had come too early as poor old Fanny was on her knees struggling with a rabbit. "He's eating them all!" cried Fanny, so Dick and I helped her.

It was the biggest rabbit I'd ever seen and it was no wonder Fanny was struggling as it wriggled around but finally we scared it off but in our battle Dick and I spilled our heavy load all over her face.

How we laughed as we lay there on the ground in the field me laid tickling Dick while Fanny dripped with our cream and old farmer Winkle was obviously struggling with the rabbit too as he was on his knees now tugging away and asking us to help him.

The end
posted by klausness at 5:49 AM on June 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


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