irethtelrunya:deadcatwithaflamethrower:nyxserpent:we-are-rogue:elucubrare:beggars-opera:Best of A Cl
irethtelrunya:deadcatwithaflamethrower:nyxserpent:we-are-rogue:elucubrare:beggars-opera:Best of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1st and 2nd editions (1785 and 1788), part 1#WHAT is to bagpipe“Grose also lists “to bagpipe, a lascivious practice too indecent for explanation.” Even Farmer and Henley, brave champions of obscenity who boldly explained fucking, refuse to define to bagpipe in their dictionary — they simply repeat Grose’s definition manqué. One hopes for something really spectacular from these words, but they are simply the Victorian version of blow job, slang for fellatio, a practice evidently much more shocking one or two centuries ago. Another popular Victorian word for this lascivity was gamahuche. It derives from French, so it probably was a euphemism”~ Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing [more here]Mark Morton, in The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex, offers this fascinating etymology for the French gamahucher: “Possibly “going below the base” from Medieval Latin gamma ut, the note below the tonic in Guido D'Arezzo’s six-note scale.” Guido D’Arezzo was the guy who came up with modern musical notation in the 11th century, and “Ut” was the original name of “Do” (as in Do Re Mi…). And there was a mnemonic device calledthe Guidonian Hand, designed to teach musicians how to sight-read, which spanned ~3 octaves from “Γ ut” (or “Gamma ut”) to “E la”. So Gamma ut was the absolute lowest note.By the way, this is exactly how we got the word gamut: it originally meant “the lowest note of musical scale”, and later expanded to the whole scale, or the whole range of any kind.And Mortonclaims this is also how we got the word gamahuche, for blowjob. He says (in a chapter titled “Go Down Moses: Oral Sex Words”): “a note that was “down there,” so to speak. Thanks to this notion, the noun gamma-ut might have developed a verb form—gamahucher—denoting a sex act that takes place at an anatomically “low” level. (The idiom to go down on someone, which since the early twentieth century has denoted both fellatio and cunnilingus, also embodies that “low down” notion.)” I have NO idea if that etymology is plausible or more generally accepted (it seems wildly far-fetched to me, but what do I know), I just wanted to share.@deadcatwithaflamethrower I don’t think it was the mere blowjob that was the shock. Bagpipe TO bagpipe, it said, not just one bagpipe,. That’s two guys enjoying a 69, and that was apparently why the original author was clutching at his pearls in shock.Or the dude just didn’t want anyone to wonder why he’d know what that meant, either because dude-sex! or because SCOTTISH! because the latter was probably more unpopular in England at the time than dude-sex. (Remember, it hadn’t been that long since the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, and everyone was seriously fucking tetchy.)The comma there separates it into two phrases of the same meaning, tho. “Bagpipe” and “To bagpipe,” not “Bagpipe TO bagpipe.”Yeah, sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s just indicating that the thing is an infinitive verb.The blowjob thing has never been 100% confirmed as far as I know, but it just makes sense, because honestly, just think about that imagery. -- source link