This came up today with my 15 yo regarding the slogan his class wants to use on their class t-shirts. The slogan is a play on the teacher’s last name and includes the phrase “balling to the top”.
He just thought it was stupid. I was surprised the teacher would even consider it until I remembered she’s very young.
Please ignore the extraneous “d” in the title.
YouTube Little Richard’s Lucille. That’s the earliest I’m familiar with, from my parents’ era, but I’ve always known it meant sex. I’ll check the OED tomorrow at work for origins but my bet is most are familiar thanks to popular music.
Well, my original thought was that people would know it as a sexual term. I should have added age to the poll, but didn’t think about it. I wonder if people who are not familiar with Little Richard or Led Zeppelin would know it.
I’m not familiar with the music of Little Richard or Led Zeppelin (although I generally know who they are), but I definitely would immediately associate the T-shirt slogan with sexual slang.
Zappa fans know it: Suzy Creamcheese starts off the song Absolutely Free (from the album We’re Only In It For The Money) by proclaiming “I don’t do publicity balling for you anymore.”
ETA: Of course, I knew it as slang for “fucking” before I heard the tune.
I’ve seen it now and then. I recall it being used in the Stephen King novel Pet Semetary for example.
Nope, never heard of it, not even as a quaint thing that old people say. To me, balling means playing a ball-based sport or being extremely cool. I’m a 28-year-old straight white male, if that matters.
Yeah balling is the act of being baller which is how we referred to swag when I was in high school.
Learned it only this year when I read an old Forsyth book (The Negotiator.)
huh…no shit…
I grew up with its sexual connotation so any reference to it is immediately sexual. If I witnessed a group of kids with that on their shirt there would be no mistake one of two things happened, one. I am old, or two…the teacher is an idiot.
Send a note to his teacher. Hopefully she’ll change slogans.
I did a little while ago. I was nice. She’s young, mid-20’s or so. I suspect she didn’t know.
"Hi Miss [lastname]!
Charles was telling me about the slogans for the advisory t-shirts. I am wondering if you are aware of the use of the term “balling” to mean having sex. I am not sure if the kids are all aware of it, but I am certain some of them must be, and more than a few of their parents will be.
I just wanted to bring this to your attention."
She’s very good about responding, so I expect to hear from her tomorrow. I don’t imagine they would probably have made it to the printers, but hopefully I spare her some embarrassment of the principal (or whoever has to approve them) having to explain it to her.
This is interesting - when I first heard the lyric, “Wanna be a baller,” I found it hilarious, since I’d only ever heard “balling” as a sexual term.
I also snicker whenever someone misspells “bawling” (as in crying loudly) as “balling.”
Oh yeah, in middle school we thought it was a great joke to tell this really hot girl who was in percussion section, “Stacy, you’d look good bald” with pun intended. We laughed when she said innocently “I would?” Ha ha, gosh we were dumb. So many embarrassing things to look back upon, like trying to impress a girl by draping her yard and trees with 24 rolls of toilet paper. And the worst of it was it wasn’t her house, she lived with her parents - which we kinda all did when in the 6th grade. What total idiots we were. :o
And then when that song about streaking was popular and being played on the radio, don’t even want to talk about our response to that. 
“Ball” as a term for sexual intercourse was quite common in the hippie era. It’s not used much now, if at all, which is probably why the teacher didn’t know about it.
Heck, I had a girlfriend who was too embarrassed to use any ordinary term for two people having sex, so “balling” was her go-to euphemism.
Now that’s balling the Jack!
My first thought when I hear “balling” is sex (I grew up in the 60’s). I can’t think of any meaning for “balling to the top” that would make it a class slogan. Am I missing something, or are the kids just being snerky at the teacher’s expense?
The lyrics for that song remind me of The Hokey Pokey. I’ll resist the urge to go down that road.
I think you are confusing Little Richard’s Lucille with his Good Golly Miss Molly. The former does not contain the word “ball”, the latter does:
Good Golly Miss Molly!
You sure like to ball.
When you’re rockin’ and a-rolling,
Can’t you hear your mamma call?
However, although the sexual meaning of “ball” certainly fits here, I am not entirely convinced that it was intended (at least, not unambiguously). In this case “ball” might just mean something like “party”. This fits better with the rocking and rolling (although that may once have meant having sex, too). The song is from 1958, though. My feeling is that “ball” came into popular use to mean “have sex” a bit later, in the '60s sometime, probably with the hippies.
I grew up with the sexual meaning of balling, but I was also aware that it’s not used that way anymore. It’s pretty common for slang usage to change over time.
I’m sure I’m not the only one old enough to remember when bitch and slut were synonyms.