Yesterday, Languagehat posted a nice entry on meretricious Latin. The page he links to seems to have been cribbed mainly from Oxford classicist James N. Adams who wrote the must-have dirty Latin reference book: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. And while I'm on the subject of dirty words I might as well put a plug in for Friedrich Karl Forberg [1770-1848] and his salacious De figuris Veneris which was englished in 1844 as The Manual of Classical Erotology. (It was reprinted by Grove Press in 1966 like so many classics of Victorian pornography but is sadly out of print.)
Variant Veteres in re spurca oblique significanda. Ac pro irrumare quidem dixerunt offendere buccam, corrumpere buccas, illudere capitibus, insultare capitibus, non parcere capiti, os percidere, summa petere, altiora tangere, comprimere linguam, μίγνυσθαι τὴν ἄῤῥητον μίξιν [mignusthai ten arrheton miksin]; pro fellare autem ore morigerari, ore adlaborare, lambere medios viros, lingere, tacere.
[Forberg 1966, vol. 1, pp.214-20]
The Ancients employed many forms of circumlocution to convey the meaning of their filthy practices. For instance, instead of irrumate, they said: to offend the mouth, corrupt the mouth, to attack the head, to defy the face, insult the head, not to spare the head, to split open the mouth, gain the heights, mount to loftier regions, compress the tongue, to indulge in abominable intercourse, and instead of receiving the member into the mouth they said: to lend the mouth in kind complaisance, work with his mouth, lick men's middle parts, lick simply, or lastly to be quiet.
[Forberg 1966, vol. 1, pp.215-21]
This quotation spans five pages, even for the Latin and odd for the English because each term or phrase is footnoted copiously.
Posted by jim at November 1, 2003 08:58 AM | TrackBack