In Huxley’s Brave New World he writes of Calvin Stopes and His Sixteen
Sexophonists. At one point in the song ‘There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine’, when the whole group reaches the climax, all of the Sexophonists ‘wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and the tenor registers as though the little death were upon them’. A brilliantly funny passage, but it contains a riddle.
Do you, or does perhaps anyone else, know if in Huxley’s day the expression ‘le petit mort’ was used to mean the experience of dying it
is said we all have when we have an orgasm?
I’ve heard the expression (the little (feminine) death) in reference to the big O before. The first time was in an Xmen comic. Gamit called some woman le petite mort. Imagine the scandal when Wizard magazine mentioned that it was a slang term for an orgasm.
Kind of off-topic, but I’ve heard that “le petit mort” is only used as slang for orgasms in English-speaking countries, even though it is in French. It supposedly means nothing to the French beyond the literal meaning.
Can any French/Canadian/Belgian/Algerian/Senegalese people verify this?
So here I am reading book 9 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I come across (no pun intended) this passage that made me do a double take:
“Like most French expressions–“ennui,” which is a fancy term for severe bordom, or “la petite mort,” which describes a feeling that part of you has died–“deja vu” refers to something that is usually not very pleasant…” I had to go online to verify that “la petite mort” meant what I thought it meant.
