Tag Archives: language

Dancing and Sex

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Everyone’s heard the joke about the fundamentalist who won’t have sex standing up because it looks too much like dancing. In fact sex and dancing have long been linked.

Remember Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show? Well, neither do I,(1) but his appearance was famously broadcast with a picture showing him only from the waist up. His dancing and pelvic gyrations, along with the lustful rhythms of pop music, were sure, it was thought, to lead directly and immediately to teenage pregnancy.(2)

But there’s another connection between shaking your booty and doing the horizontal mambo. In popular songs, the word “dance” is often a code word for sex.(3) Or rather, the sex act.

That’s right. You can take almost any pop song that talks about dancing and substitute your favorite word for coitus.(4) I have here a modest list.

screw, boink, boff, shag, bonk, bang, fornicate with, do it, eff, copulate, hook up, get laid, get it on, bed, sleep with,(5) score, bone, nail, and the good old f-bomb (6)

Let’s try it, shall we?

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me”(7) becomes “I Want to Screw With Somebody Who Loves Me.” “Dancing in the Dark” translates to “Fornicating in the Dark.”(8)

Some translations seem perfectly natural. for example, “Come Dancing” shifts easily and appropriately to “Come Boinking.” “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” becomes, quite understandably, “All She Wants to Do is Shag.”

Other combinations get a little weirder. “Boffing on the Ceiling” sounds strange and difficult, yet somehow tantalizing.(9) And “Save the Last Copulation for Me” is neither romantic nor sexy.

Of course the theory breaks down after a while. I’m pretty sure that “Dancing in the Streets” is surely not code for “Getting Laid in the Streets.” And “Land of 1000 Hookups” can’t possibly be right.

On the other hand, “Flashfuck: What a Feeling!” adds a whole new dimension to the song.

Here are a few more choice specimens:(10)

“Scoring With Myself”
“Safety Bonk”(11)
“I Can’t Stop Screwing”
“Private Boinker”
“Your Mama Don’t Fuck”(12)

On the other hand, I suppose the Beatles song would become “Why Don’t We Dance in the Road?” and Jimmy Buffett’s, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Dance?” I doubt if either would have been a big hit, but I could be wrong. At least they could be played on Top 40 radio.

(1) Oh, come on. I’m not that old.
(2) Ah, the good ol’ days, when a set of earplugs was considered a prophylactic.
(3) A little code word game: thug = _______, Hitler = _______, gun = _______, haggis = _______.
(4) A shout-out to The Big Bang Theory. Nobody else says “coitus” anymore, not even sex researchers.
(5) Which shouldn’t even be on the list. If you’re sleeping, you’re doing it wrong. (See “do it,” above.)
(6) For those of cleanly mind, just replace all these words with “freak.” There is an app that “cleans up” sexy novels. One problem: Every reference to the sex act becomes “freak.” Men’s genitals are “groin” and women’s, “bottom.” This leads to some fascinating dialogue:
“Where shall I [freak] you, Victoria? Where do you want my [groin]?”
“I want it in . . . my [bottom].”
You can read more about it here: http://www.romancenovelnews.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1167:my-clean-reader-app-experience&Itemid=53,
(7) This was an early hit for Whitney Houston, back when she’d sing things like, “No matter what they take from me/they can’t take away my dignity.” Boy, was she ever wrong on that one.
(8) Please. “This gun’s for hire”? See #3, above.
(9) “Banging on the Ceiling” could go either way, as it were.
(10) Feel free to play along at home. Send me any really good ones. Or really bad ones.
(11) Should be the theme song for Planned Parenthood.
(12) Realistically, she had to have, at least once. Unless you’re adopted. Or cloned.

I Arched Before Arching Was Cool

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Sorry, Katniss Everdeen. Sorry, Merida Whatever-your-last-name-was.

You may be role models for today’s girls who, it is said, are taking up archery in record numbers.(1) But I was there first.

It all started in a 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno, California…. No wait, it didn’t. That was Ted Baxter.(2) Rewind. Push play.

It all started down the street from our house, where one of our neighbors set up an archery target by his garage, stood at the end of his driveway, and practiced his Errol Flynn Zen.

All the neighbor kids gathered round. After all, it was way more interesting than watching the other neighborhood dads mow their lawns or build concrete birdbaths.

When I showed interested, my father, who approved of all things martial (if not artsy), bought me a kid’s bow.

And what a bow it was! What’s called a traditional longbow (though a very, very short one). It was made of pink and white fiberglass, swirled in a candy mint pattern, with a red grip and arrow rest. It was a girlie bow, but it was a real, honest-to-goodness functioning one.

I spent many happy hours taking potshots at a gun target(3) taped to he side of the garage(4). And walking back and forth to collect the arrows. This is what passed for exercise in my youth, and is more than I get these days.

Dad got me accessories too, like the arm guard and the shooting glove. The arm guard is an absolute necessity. Just whang the inside of your left arm with the bowstring once because you weren’t holding the bow properly, and you’ll know what I mean. At least six inches of burning, stinging scrape-bruise. If you don’t have an arm guard, keep lots of ice packs handy.

I .

Fast forward a decade or so, and there I was at college, in the field for my second time through a class in Intermediate Archery. (There was no Advanced Archery, so I had to keep cycling through Intermediate to make my required number of gym credits.(5))

“Who has never shot a bow before?” the instructor shouted.

I raised my hand. She rolled her eyes.

There had been a fair amount of eye-rolling on her part. One day I showed up for class wearing a forest green wool cape and a matching Robin Hood hat.(6) I did not bring the pink bow, as it would have clashed hideously. (I would still have my candy-ass pink bow today, except that over the years, the fiberglass shredded.) The school had better bows, in sensible colors.

On rainy days we stayed inside and learned to fletch. (Fletching means putting the feathers on the arrow’s rear end (the non-pointy end, right in front of the nock, which is the little notch that the bowstring fits into). (Isn’t vocabulary fun!)

We even learned to make “frou-frou” arrows(7), which a 1958 Boy’s Life magazine says have “air brakes.” What they really had were big, fluffy, silly-looking feathers. The advantage of frou-frou arrows was that they would fly a certain distance, then stop abruptly, point directly down, and impale themselves in the ground. The perpendicular shaft and fancy feathers made the arrows easy to find when you missed the target. Which we did. Often. We didn’t have those fancy modern bows with bowsights and scopes and assorted sniper-rifle attachments in those days. Which is definitely a good thing, or I might have become an arrow-sniper instead of a writer/editor.

And if that didn’t work out for some reason, at least I could always survive in a post-apocalyptic dystopia or cartoon Scotland. Who else do you know that can say that?

(1) Record numbers are not necessarily big numbers, you understand.
(2) Bonus points for identifying this reference. Double points if you don’t have to Google.
(3) We could have bought archery targets, but honestly, there were a lot of gun targets lying around our garage, just waiting for holes to be made in them.
(4) Later in life, my husband practiced with shuriken by sailing them at the side of our garage. He broke a window.
(5) In those days, universities could still force you to take gym. We had to take at least four semesters, and by the end of it, you had better know how to swim, unless you already knew how to swim and tested out of it. This was actually a reasonable requirement, since sliding downhill on cafeteria trays was a popular recreational activity, and at the bottom of the hill was a large lake.
(6) My mother made them for me. She had a definite whimsical side. Once she made me a camouflage flannel nightgown (neck-to-toes style). I wore it to the office Halloween party and claimed I was dressed as “Granny Rambo.”
(7) I am not making this up. There really are such things and they really are, or at least were, called that. Modern archers may have decided to butch up the name.

Language Police and the Grammar Nazis

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For most of my life I’ve been a grammar nazi. For part of my life I was a member of the language police. At one point, my business cards even identified me as punctuation czar.

I now have regrets.

In general, I hate the language police. However, I do understand their philosophy, and it’s not wrong. The implementation of it is sometimes questionable and heavy-handed, but the theory is sound. How we speak and the words we choose to use do affect our thinking. The reverse is also true. Our thinking determines our language choices. If you want to change one, changing the other one is one of the easiest routes. You can see its effectiveness in the fact that n-word is no longer acceptable not just in polite society, but in any context. The next to go will be the r-word, a much-used schoolyard taunt in my childhood. The world is better off without both of them.

Does eliminating the terms mean that people no longer think them or think of people in those terms? That’s a tough question, but we hope the change is real and positive. If there’s a chance that it is, the effort is worth it, even if restrictions of language choices seem foolish, feel dictatorial, and are easy to mock.

Indeed they are easy to mock. Hence the term “politically correct,” now a code-word for any words or phrases you think are unnecessary, clunky, or purely propaganda. Who hasn’t laughed at the saying, “I’m not overweight; I’m under-tall”? Who hasn’t winced when nouns (“slaves”) become long phrases (“person who is enslaved”). (The point of that one is to make the hearer think of the person first, and then the condition – slavery – and realize that slaves are not intrinsically slaves and not automatically slaves forever. They may have been free in the past or will be free in the future. I’m not sure that example will be successful. But “person with dyslexia” is, I think, better than “a dyslexic.”)

Textbooks these days are rife with examples, and when I wrote for and edited textbooks, I had to police the language. We couldn’t talk about birthday parties or vacations because some kids had never had one. We couldn’t talk about dragons, even in fiction because that might imply magic and hence Satanism. I once spent hours trying to think of a breakfast food that would be recognizable in most cultures. The best I could come up with was “juice.” Our joke was that the only acceptable words in the title of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea were “the” and “and.”

Being a grammar nazi is a different matter. I used to take delight in knowing all the rules and enforcing them ruthlessly. Gradually I have gotten away from that practice. I felt it was impolite to go around correcting people unless they had asked for my help. I still corrected my family because – hey – it was mentally painful to be around people who misused hopefully or split infinitives. Or who mispronounced “nuclear” or “foliage,” for that matter. But I would keep my cringes inside when my boss mispronounced “sarcophagus,” until he finally asked me, “Is that how you say that?”

Over time, though, I’ve loosened up my standards a little bit. Before I was a prescriptivist (believing in and enforcing rules), but the older I get, the more I am moving in the direction of descriptivism (accepting the way people really talk). (Except in writing, which is more formal. And don’t tell me I just used a sentence fragment and started a sentence with a conjunction. That is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.)

I can thank linguistics for this shift in perspective. In one of my linguistics classes, I disputed with another student about whether a certain usage was sub-standard or non-standard. I was firmly on the side of non-standard. How I reconciled that with my insistence on the Oxford comma, I’ll never know.

The watershed moment in the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate came when one of the major dictionaries decided not to include usage labels like “vulgar” and “slang.” Essentially they were declaring that all words were equal in the eyes of the lexicographers. This caused quite an uproar. If there were no standards for usage, how could we prove that we were better than the people who spoke sloppily or incorrectly?

My soul was torn.

The change that came over me was due in part to a stunning revelation – that the English language and the Latin language are two separate animals. The old bugaboo about not splitting infinitive, to which I was passionately devoted, has its source in the fact that in Latin it is impossible to split an infinitive. Latin infinitives are all one word. It makes no sense to transfer that rule to English. “To boldly go” would not be possible in Latin but now is perfectly acceptable – to me – in terms of grammar as well as rhythm and meter.

I still can’t abide weather forecasters, though. “Rain shower precipitation activity”? What? Do they get paid by the word?

Books, etc.: Remembering Suzette Haden Elgin

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A few days ago a friend informed me that Suzette Haden Elgin had died. This was not unexpected. She was almost 80, and had been in ill health for a while, and suffering with dementia, along with other disabilities.

I never met her, except through her work, but I mourn her passing.

Suzette was a trained linguist, a language maven, and a writer. She is perhaps best known for her books in the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series. Though not as well-known as Deborah Tannen’s or John Gray’s works, Suzette’s are practical, straightforward, and supremely useful.

She was interested in many aspects of language. She thought and wrote about language and religion, language and politics (especially framing), language and women’s issues, language and perception, language and culture, and more.

For many years she kept up a Live Journal and two newsletters. Under the LJ name Ozarque, she stimulated thought and discussion of her many fields of interest. These were lively, educational, interactive, and fascinating forums in the way that Live Journal blogs are meant to be and seldom are.

She was a writer of science fiction novels, stories, and poetry. I was astounded by her Native Tongue series. (Who besides me could possibly be interested in feminist linguistic science fiction? Many people, it turns out.)

In the Native Tongue series, Suzette described a newly created “women’s language” called Láadan. She and others pursued the idea and constructed a grammar, a dictionary, and lessons available online – way before anyone tried to do the same with Klingon.

She worked on new fiction until the dementia descended. In her LJ, she would sometimes post poems and songs (particularly Christmas carols) and solicit feedback from her audience, sometimes incorporating their suggestions into the piece. The Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Elgin Awards are given in her memory.

She attended science fiction conventions, where she could meet and interact with her readers. One she often attended was WisCon in Madison, WI, the premier feminist science fiction convention, and in 1986 was one of their Guests of Honor.

On a more personal note, she once took the time to give me feedback on a piece I was writing about bullying, also a concern of hers.

She was a kind, humane, quirky, quick-witted, creative, varied, engaged, humorous, brave lady and a brilliant scholar and writer. I will miss her and her work. The world is poorer for her passing, but richer for her legacy.

Light Crumbs and Muffin Bones

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A woman told a joke and I collapsed in hysterics before she even got to the punchline. Here’s the set-up:

Why did the man have a hundred-dollar bill tattooed on his wing-wing?

That’s when I lost it.(1)

I found out later that she called a woman’s genitals her “tutu.” Which no doubt confused her kids the first time they saw a ballet.

Almost every family, and many politicians and pundits, have trouble calling things by their right names. So we have “lady parts” and “va-jay-jays” and “junk.” Even “uterus” was too shocking for the Florida State Legislature, which reprimanded a member for letting such a word fall on delicate ears, “particularly [those of] the young pages and messengers who are seated in the chamber during debates.”(2)

But every family also has unique words and phrases that enter their vocabulary and stay there, though not for fear of giving offense. They’re just things that no outsider understands.

Some of these terms are created by children and have no equivalent in adult language. One little girl said she wanted an Easter hat with a “go-down.” “You’ll have to show me one,” her mother said. Turns out a go-down was a ribbon that dangled down the back.

Another child invented “move-down” for that moment during a meal when you’re not completely full but need your stomach contents to settle a bit. My husband and I have adopted that one. It’s just so darn useful. “Are you through?” “No, just having a move-down.”

Here’s a good example of one of our neologisms(3): Light crumbs. Dan works nights and hates to leave lights on because of the power bills. I, on the other hand, can’t find my way upstairs without light. I can’t even get from the sofa to the switch by the stairs. If I get up the stairs, I can’t make it to the switch in the bathroom. If I get that far, I can’t make it to my bedside lamp. I have balance problems and walking in the dark makes me dizzy. Plus we have a cat whose nickname is “Mr. Underfoot.”

So Dan leaves a trail of light crumbs for me to follow like a vision-impaired Hansel and/or Gretel. Instead of turning them on as I reach them, I turn them off as I pass them. It’s less doofy than hanging a flashlight around my neck, more agreeable than sending the power company more than absolutely necessary, and easier on Garcia’s tail. Win, win, win.

Many of our personal vocabulary items have to do with food. Here are a few, with definitions.

Muffin bones. When you eat ribs, you usually have a side plate for the bones. When my husband was doing the low-carb thing, he wouldn’t eat pizza crusts. He would put them aside, and they became pizza bones. Similarly, the empty, sticky, crumby fluted paper cups that hold muffins are muffin bones.

Tuna juice. No, we don’t put fish through a juicer.(4) Tuna juice is the water that tuna packed in water is packed in. Cats love it, either straight up or mixed with their regular food.

Not-flan. I had a recipe for a sweet baked good involving pastry crust, eggs, cream cheese, sugar, and optional fruit topping. My husband kept calling it “flan.” I told him that wasn’t the thing’s name. “What is it then?” he demanded. I was stumped. “Well, not flan!” I replied. Ever since that has been our name for it. Later, after I thought it over, “Way-Too-Big Cheese Danish” would have been more accurate. But by then it was too late.(5)

Cat-related activities are good sources for invented words too. Here are some of ours:

Cat fit. Also known as “the Crazy Hour,” this is when cats race around the house for no apparent reason, as if the devil himself were after them.(6)

Bag mice. Those things that make the rustling noise inside either paper or plastic, that cats must protect their owners from. I was pleased to learn that this phenomenon must be universal, as once in Dubrovnik, a black catten(7) detected bag mice in our souvenir bag. (It’s also possible that it just wanted to sneak into the U.S.)

Kitty burrito. Not a food item, but what you must make in order to give a cat pills, fluids, eye drops, or other indignities. Swaddling in a towel is traditional, but we find that dropping the cat in a pillowcase and then doing the burrito folds makes it harder for the patient to squirm loose.

I have not trademarked or copyrighted any of these words or phrases. Feel free to use them if you wish. And if you’d like to share some of your most useful invented vocabulary items with readers of this blog, please do. But please, no euphemisms or slang terms for penis and vagina. We already have way too many of those.

(1) If you are the one person in the world who’s never heard it, the punchline is: Because he heard how women love to blow money.

(2) Pages and messengers range in age from 12-18. I envision an 18-year-old asking, “Mommy, what’s a uterus?”

(3) Look it up.

(4) Or cook them in the dishwasher, which apparently is a thing.

(5) This was also not during Dan’s low-carb phase.

(6) Once Maggie got her back paw tangled in a plastic shopping bag, got scared, and was chased up the stairs by a recently purchased videotape of An American in Paris, which is not exactly the devil, but pretty alarming anyway. Because no matter how fast you run, it’s still always Right There Behind You.

(7) Not a kitten, but not full-grown; a teen-ager.