Don’t know whether this belongs in GQ or GD but anyway.
I’m sure if you’re 35 and under, you’ll definitely have come across young people laughing at using the word ‘spanking children’ young boys ‘playing together’, or even something as silly as teens ‘having fun’.
We could laugh it off to immaturity but it seems that an awful lot of words are becoming sexualized. I remember reading the history of vulgar language and it did have ties to sexual parts of the human body but it does seem to be getting a bit too much.
Ha…remember in 11th grade the teacher unintetionally set us up for this joke. Don’t remember much about High School Mathematics but it had to do with ‘one sum + two sum = three sum’
No one realized until a guy said ‘Excuse me miss, Is that a threesome?’
I’m not sure what you mean by “more.” When I was a kid in the 80s, we definitely sexualized a lot of words when we were going through our sexually curious phases. I remember getting pulled out of class in fourth grade because I had giggle fits at the word “thing,” since we used it in my peer group as a word for “penis.” The class that day was on nouns: a person, place, or thing giggle.
That would have been 1984. By the time high school rolled around, the euphemisms were far expanded.
It’s not that language is becoming more sexualized, it’s that people are becoming more immature. (No cite, but according to information & belief, i.e., advertisements, adults are now taking gummy candy vitamins and seeking out stickers for performing adult activities, etc.) Now it’s one thing to indulge in a little bawdy humor, but something else to jump some innocent thing into something relating to sex (“Oh, you had a tossed salad for lunch? YOu got your salad tossed, for lunch?”*) That’s skeevy and tiresome. And there’s someone in every office who always does it.
*Also they don’t really toss them. That’s a figure of speech, they’re basically just stirred.
femmejean, how old are you? Because it sounds like you’re either so young that you don’t realize that teenagers have always been that way, or so old that you’ve forgotten how you and your peers were when you were teens.
When I was growing up, there were different terms for many occupations, depending on the sex of the person doing it.
Actor/actress
waiter/waitress
steward/stewardess
comedian/comedienne
editor/editrix
author/authoress
aviator/aviatrix
executor/executrix
fiancé/fiancée
plus all the ones specifically naming the persons’ sex: fireman, policeman, postman, etc.
But these are largely disappearing from language now. Either being replaced by using one as a gender-neutral one (usually the male version) or changing to one more descriptive of the job rather than the person (firefighter, postal carrier).
I attended a performance of Henry V last Saturday. If bawdy innuendo was good enough for Shakespeare, I don’t think we can complain much.
(I still remember attending a concert by the Kronos Quartet many years ago, when Joan Jeanrenaud was still a member, and a friend of mine a few rows back was heard to exclaim - “I wouldn’t mind rosining her bow!”)
What is and is not taboo changes with time. Shakespeare was heavily censored in later years, particularly for children.
I think it is safe to say that over the last half/three-quarters century. in the western world, the level of sexual terminology that would be considered taboo has lessened greatly. That doesn’t mean that peoples actual sexual practices have changed, necessarily, just how much it is acceptable to talk about them in public. So something that would not be considered a double entendre, or certainly not comment on as such in “polite” company, would now be.
I don’t personally think it is necessarily a bad thing, the fact that just as much sex was being had, but no one was talking about it had some very serious repercussions.
Not related to the OP at all. But I learned from a autobiography of John Von Neumann recently that Matrix has the same origin (originally meaning a female animal for breeding)
