Were you aware that the English still use this word both in the context of meatball and log?
Same with “pecker”.
I read one phrase that made me chuckle, I forget what book or exactly how it went, but it was something like (heavily paraphrased):
“Because of the positioning of the office, he used to bump up against his secretary every day.”
Secretary meaning the old style desk, of course.
In an earlier thread on a similar subject, one line that made me laugh out loud in the office was from a child-rearing book from the turn of the century. One of the chapters was titled:
Baby’s First Ejaculation
“Making love” as a near-synonym to “flirting” is common in movies through the 40s at least.
In Horatio Alger’s **Ragged Dick ** (don’t start!), there’s a line where villain Mickey Maguire tells Dick “I seen you before!” to which Dick replies “The p’raps you’d like to see me behind!” and spins around to show Maguire his back.
I assume it was originally meant to be a play on “perhaps you’d like to see me from the back” rather than “perhaps you’d like to see my ass.”
Moderator notes: ultrafilter posted a link to the superdickery website. In the past, we’ve had trouble with that site on account of popups and spyware and so forth. Hence, I’ve disabled the link but left the url. If you want to go there, you certainly can, but just be alerted to the risks.
If anyone knows definitively whether they’ve cleaned up that website, please let me know and I won’t continue to disable links.
I had a children’s book called A Cat Called Too-too that contained the line “keep your pecker up.” I didn’t get it the first time I read it but when I re-read it at age 12 or so, I got quite the snicker out of it.
I must still be 12, because the words “frigate” and “Uranus” still make me snicker.
In Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League,” the bank manager is quite irritated to be missing his nightly card game while staking out the vault with Holmes, Watson and the police. To paraphrase: “Ill have you know that I’m missing my rubber tonight… I haven’t missed my rubber in over a decade!”
Companies performing the works of Gilbert & Sullivan on this side of the pond will often, for obvious reasons, bowlderize the following line from Trial by Jury:
What surprised me is that this appeared in a Harry Potter book (I believe it was #5, though it might have been #6). I only saw it once, but I did chuckle, wondering if Ron should really be ejaculating in public at Hogwarts. And in front of Hermione, too, IIRC! 
Two from “The Lord of the Rings”:
Tolkien has Aragorn say that Eomer “is no niggard” for giving to Gondor that which was most fair in Rohan (giving Eowyn’s hand in marriage to Fararmir) - that is to say Eomer was not greedy or selfish.
Also someone, Faramir, I think, tells Eowyn she fell for Aragon because he was a lord of men, high and puissant. I had to look that one up (means powerful). Tolkien’s great command of language failed him there, I think.
I once ran a paperback called “Double Entendre”. Here’s the cover (borderline NSFW): http://pictures.abebooks.com/JOHNMCCORMICK/564537286.jpg
It was mostly cartoons, but it reprinted an article with its original title: “Sexual Intercourse”. It was about informing a growing boy about etiquette and social contact between the sexes.
Obviously Aragorn never worked for the District of Columbia government. My boy was puissant, but he was never a puissy. 
I can’t read any pirate books to my kids without them howling over “poop deck”.
Just after the revolution there, I went to Romania and spent several weeks there distributing aid to various places. On the tour we had a translator who did sterling work for us, but he had learned English from the King James Bible, as when he was a kid, English had been banned from schools and they had to learn Russian instead. He had decided that if Russia/communism was the enemy, then all things English must be good, and he’d got hold of this Bible and a very old dictionary published in Victorian times. You can imagine that his turn of phrase was rather quaint.
The only problem was when a few months later we were on our way to Romania again when one of the drivers fell ill. My dad offered to step into the empty place, and off we went. We arrived to find we had the same interpreter again, and after greetings and introductions all round, he turned to my Dad and said “Many are the hours of sweet intercourse that I have spent with your daughter.”
Bwa ha ha ha ha! Except that it would have be incredibly rude, so we all had to swallow it (snerk) and smile politely…
In Jane Eyre, Jane and Mr. Rochester talk about how he is like “a Vulcan.” They are referring to the misshapen Roman god, but whenever I read that line, I can’t help picturing Mr. Rochester with pointed ears and one eyebrow archly upraised a la Mr. Spock.
Also in the same novel, Mr. Rochester calls Jane a “little niggard!” when she refuses to give some money back to him.
Most of the Biggles books haven’t aged especially well- Especially if you’re not familiar with WWI history.
A good example is the reference to “Archie” (Ack-Ack/Flak or Anti-Aircraft fire).
More modern readers probably have an amusing mental image of the Germans throwing the comic book character at Biggles’ Sopwith Camel in an effort to shoot him down… 
Well, that is a perfectly acceptable word. Margaret Mitchell uses it in Gone With the Wind. It just sounds too much like a racial slur to be acceptable today.
Just thought of another one from LOTR: In one battlefield scene he speaks of someone (perhaps Prince Imrahil) going on ahead in the van. So a modern person pictures a mini-van driving along while Tolkien meant van as the foremost or front division of the army.
It’s Eomer, Legolas, and Strider who “went in the van.” Look about half-way through the chapter titled “Helm’s Deep.” I like to picture it as a VW minibus with giant DayGlo daisies myself.
Well, that’s the point. As with the other “niggardly” examples above, we may know it’s not actually related to the infamous N word, but it’s close enough phonetically to give modern sensibilities a bit of a jolt. In the 1980s miniseries of Jane Eyre with Timothy Dalton, the line is retained and there’s always a moment of “Wait–what did he just call her?” when I hear him say it.