Take This Job and Shove It, Er...

The "doctors" at Salon.com made a somewhat dubious claim in today's column:

"As an interesting side note, the term 'blow job' does not refer to the action (despite generations of teenage girls confused about whether to suck or blow). Strangely enough, the term probably comes to us from the poet Walt Whitman, who penned it in his poem 'I Sing the Body Electric,' in which 'white-blow' is a reference to male ejaculation."

While it's terribly romantic to think that prostitutes in the 1940s sat around reading Whitman (specifically, a poem written in 1900) between customers, I put a little more stock into Random House. (I have to say, after doing a search for the etymology of the term "blow job," I felt it would be a good idea to clear my History file.)

Sexual slang is perplexing, though. I mean, why "felching"? Dan Savage readers have given us "pegging" (a woman performing anal sex on a man with a strap on) through a simple vote, and I have to admit a bit of puzzlement whenever I read a gay porn review in H/X. As long as you know what it means when you agree to do it, I guess it doesn't matter where we get it from.

As an aside, I recently learned why the word "faggot" was originally applied to homosexual men, and I was totally apalled. I can't even use the word "flaming" without wincing now. Ah, but just some brief research reminds me not to believe everything I hear on a LGBT-educational program on PBS. The idea that homosexuals were burned among the "faggots" (bundles of sticks) when heretics were burned at the stake isn't documented across the board, but is only occasionally found. It makes so much sense, but others posit that the phrase started to mean burden, and old woman, so maybe that's where it came from for gays. One site suggested the possibility that it comes from the Yiddish "fagele" (little bird), but I'd think it was the opposite. Anyhoo, I usually say "gay" anyway, as it implies something very pleasant: happiness!