:: Sextionary: Part 1 This Generations’s Guide to Getting Down and Dirty
"They neck the same way—only they don’t call it necking and don’t talk about it."
That is the headline from a story in the June 7, 1937 issue of Life magazine. I know, I’ve just secured myself “nerd” status for the rest of my life for knowing that, but let’s face it, I already knew I was a nerd so this is nothing shocking. But to comfort those of you who may be concerned as to why I have this kind of bizarre knowledge stored in my head, rest assured; this is not the kind of stuff I normally house up there. I happened upon this interesting headline while doing research for a communications class and the wording so intrigued me that I decided to read on.
"Some of what you see on this page used to be known as “petting”…. After “petting” came “necking.” Now both of these terms are obsolete. On isolated campuses romance is “smooching,” “perching,” “mugging,” “loving up,” or “flinging woo,” but in most places it has no special name…. “Orange-peeling” is the curious name given to love-making at [Grinnell]. Boy and girl simply spread a blanket in a hayfield."
Now, I don’t know about you, but none of those terms make me want to spread a blanket in a hayfield. Actually, the hayfield itself is a huge part of the turnoff in that plan, but that’s beside the point. I started thinking, if people stopped saying “flinging woo” what exactly have they replaced it with? Seventy years later what is the lingo for “hooking up”? So I turned to my trusty contributors (all of whom I thank for their creativity and honesty) and came up with the following list (in alphabetical order):
Banging the Queen
Boinking
Boning
Burying the bone
Bumping and grinding
Bumping uglies
Doing the nasty
Doing the adult
Getting ass
Getting buns
Going for a moustache ride
Holding the pigtail handlebars
Jumping bones
Lathering up the ‘ol poonstache (which I don’t actually think we can print…)
Making babies
Making sexy time
Messing around
Mounting up
Parallel parking
Porking
Rocking the suburbs
Slamming
Sleeping together
Slipping her the willie
Any construction or keg-related verbs: banging, tapping, hitting, plowing, screwing, laying pipe, etc.
Any farm or animal related verbs: laying the egg, smoking pigs, etc.
Any food related verbs: hiding the salami, stuffing the donut, shooting the sherbet, etc.
Any music related verbs: mattress dancing, doing the horizontal Lambada, tickling the ivories, waist shaking, etc.
Any flashback verbs: knocking boots, tonsil hockey, swapping spit, making whoopee, etc.
The most interesting thing I encountered in my, uh, research, was that I was asked the same question over and over again: “what do you mean by ‘hooking up’”? And that’s when it hit me (well, that’s not actually the exact moment that it hit me, but that’s for part two of this rant); what do any of us mean when we say “hooking up”? So I decided that maybe it’s time I offered, again with the help of my contributors, a brief sextionary to help make things a little easier—at least when it comes to a description. Unfortunately this rant will need to be considered very prolonged foreplay because the second part of this is going to have to wait just a bit longer.
"They neck the same way—only they don’t call it necking and don’t talk about it."
