Watching old movies, I’ve learned that the phrase “to make love” used to mean[ul]
[li]to woo[/li][li]to flirt[/li][li]to romance[/li][/ul]
In fact when I see an old film at a theatre with an audience, there’s always a few people who aren’t aware of the old meaning and chuckle confusedly when the phrase is used.
Today the phrase refers exclusively to the marriage act. When did the change occur? Films from the late 60s seem to use it to mean the old in-out, but films as late as the early 50s seem to use it in the older less penetrative sense.
The 1960 film Let’s Make Love: better interpreted as “Let’s Be Romantic with Each Other”, or better interpreted as “Let’s Do the Horizontal Hula”?
“The marriage act”? To me, that sounds like that law that Parliament passed regulating marriages.
AFAICT, sexual intercourse is not confined to marriage. Now, one can argue that it should be confined to marriage, or that it ideally marks the consummation of a marriage, when all required duties to inaugurate the marriage have been performed, but if you simply referred to “the marriage act” in a sentence, I would not think of sexual intercourse first. Perhaps this is a difference in English dialecical usage.
Remember in one of the Chronicles of Narnia books, where C.S. Lewis describes little Lucy (the youngest child) going about the house making love to everybody?
From the time that first I became enlightened as to what the horizontal hula was all about, I routinely interpreted the phrase “making love” as refering to the physical act. That it could also refer to flirting/courting was something I had to figure out from context while watching old movies. I mean, surely Griselda the Witch was not commanding Hubert Hawkins to march upstairs and shag the fair Princess Gwendolyn. Because if that’s what she meant, he left one or two things unfinished before his debonair moment of self-defenestration.
[WAG]
I’d venture to guess (based on my feeble memory of my paltry movie collection) that the phrase took on its new meaning somewhere in the mid-to-late 60s.
[/WAG]
I know that as recently as circa 1990, my grandmother used it in the old-fashioned sense. I was somewhat shocked to learn that my sister and her boyfriend were “upstairs making love”…
My dad, ex-Hippy, says that when he was younger in the 50’s making love was used in place of “making out” and things like that, but in the 60’s the phrase “Make love, not war” became popular, and because Hippies were known for promiscuous sex, it became synonimous with “fuck like rabbits.”
Yeah, it’s funny to hear those of a certain age use certain terms. I remember my mother-in-law remarking about the hickey she was getting on her leg. Of course, by “hickey,” she meant a pimple, but I pictured someone sucking on her leg.
It makes me wonder what phrases I might use now that make my nephews snicker.
In about 1959, kids around our school were giggling about an elderly teacher who spoke of a literary couple “making love,” when she meant kissing and hugging. We knew the phrase to mean having sex, and she knew the older definition. Maybe this helps to locate the change.
Not Lucy. Jill Pole in The Silver Chair when she is trying to butter up the giants in Harfang by being cute and adorable. The phrase “She made love to everyone” is used. If I could be bothered to traipse all the way upstairs, I could find you the reference.
