Monday, July 03, 2006

It pays to increase your word power

I've learned two new expressions in the last week: 'boned', meaning 'f*cked' but, like its synonym 'shafted', being used metaphorically, as in 'f*cked over' (and don't you just love it that there's a certain kind of man who sees nothing unusual in this word having both of those meanings, much as the c-word is the most vicious insult they can think of) and 'turkey slap', meaning 'flap your nasty flaccid florid little penis in some other poor fool's face'.

I come from the young end of the generation that's now being blamed for the current wave of yoof's diseased attitude to sex, as manifested in the BB controversy. But in my own yoof, as I remember it, one engaged in sexual activity only with people that one liked. And while one was having sex with them, one was nice to them.

11 comments:

cristy said...

Sounds suspicously like consent to me.

Seems like it is a concept that is going out of fashion again...

tigtog said...

There does seem to be a resurgence of the current of thought that actually talking about sex before getting down to it is somehow taking all the fun out of everything.

And that liking and respecting the people you have sex with is somehow weak.

I think it's somehow tied in with the transition from sex the pastime to raunch the commodity.

comicstriphero said...

I decided against the turkey sandwich at lunchtime today.

JahTeh said...

I am updating my slang dictionary since it's hopelessly out of date. What's the vegetarian version?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Cristy -- indeed; and even 'consent' isn't an entirely innocent term, still carrying with it the notion that sex is something men initiate and women graciously allow. (Or not.) There's still room for an improved, more neutral term.

Tigtog -- Jesus, how incredibly depressing. I really should read young Ariel Whosis's book, if I could find the manuscript the publisher sent me under all the crap on top of the piano.

CSH -- yes, very wise. And for the foreseeable, I should think. Although I suppose you could have bought it and then gone round slapping people in the face with it, saying 'Ohhh der, it's just a bit of fun.'

JahTeh -- hmm -- I dunno, I can't think of an equivalent vegetable, or indeed fruit. 'Stick-of-overcooked-rhubarb slap'?

Ampersand Duck said...

Did you increase your awareness of 'boned' by following Sterne to superdickery?

Cozalcoatl said...

I love Superdickery.
I am very glad that November is awhile away yet and all will be forgotten. We do Aussie/Seppo style Thanksgiving every year for about 40 people. 20kg of Turkey, thats a whole lot of slapping.

Anonymous said...

Really? I had the impression that people didn't even shake hands on first meeting during the _Monkey Grip_ era (not that you were really a part of the MG era).

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Oh hey, that was Melbourne. They're weird. Also, yes, that era was indeed a while before mine.

Casual, yes; not denying that aspect for a minute. But the very casualness meant we all thought of each other primarily as human beings, because there was little UST -- any ST got R fairly quick smart. There was nothing like the contempt for women inherent in the acting-out of raunch culture, contempt which to my horror seems post-feminist.

And not just contempt of men for women, but, infinitely worse, contempt of women for themselves. I watched that footage last night of BB's announcement to the housemates of the eviction, with the abject Camilla crying and being 'sorry' -- and bugger me if I didn't want to slap her myself. I had a flash of very, very unwelcome insight into the boys' frame of what for want of a better word I'll call mind.

lucy tartan said...

Hmmm... reading Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch, on the penetrative imagery in slang language for sex, I don't detect much of a difference in available models of woman-hating between then and now.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Well, everything I've said is a massive oversimplifiction, of course. Not least that my own yoof experience involved only my boy peers at university, already a self-selected bunch to some extent, and for much of that time I was a child bride. But I was still a teenager when The Female Eunuch came out (Greer is, what, well more than half a generation older than I am) and what she's describing is a pre-feminist era. Mine was post-hippie second-wave feminist. Things had already changed.

But I think rap dialect has simply replaced pre-feminist slang as the dominant paradigm. If anything, it's worse, if only because more often and more widely heard in public culture. Models of woman-hating never die, they just mutate.