A special message to all those writing, editing, and publishing in the field of erotica and erotic romance:
I understand there’s a limited lexicon when it comes to describing a blow job. The lexicon of sex on the whole (hur) is already pretty stingy, and thus we continually face the word “nub” or, God forbid, “nubbin.”
However, for the sake of future generations, I must act now and correct any misunderstandings.
It is NOT SOMETHING ANY MAN WANTS DONE TO HIS MANJUNK.
To quote Wikipedia, a lathe is “a machine tool which spins a block of material to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, or deformation with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object which has symmetry about an axis of rotation.”
Pay attention to the action at 2:40 -3:00 for a full color video of what you’re saying is happening to the man’s little thunder rod.
You can also see what a lathe can accomplish when applied to a big, hard, massive piece of wood.
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS TURGID, STOP USING THE WORD LATHE.
The word you’re looking for is “lave,” which is Latin in origin and means “to wash, bathe, flow along or against.”
This is a far cry from “She wedged his erection between two drill points, spun it at over 2200 rpm and applied a sharp edge to the outside to carve away the unwanted wood.”
Are we clear now? If she’s “lathing” him, he’s not going to enjoy it. And if I read any use of the word “lathe,” you’ll be charged with Crimes Against Woodworking and put in the stocks for 24 hours. I’ve encountered this too many times to keep silent any longer. It is no more correct than a character saying they “could of” done something. NO. More. LATHE.
Now to work on the word “nubbin.”
We had a discussion about this topic at one point (Victoria Dahl and I made everyone squirm). Can’t remember if it was on this site or over on History Hoydens (I think it was here). Let me see if I can find it . . .
One that brought me up short, I think in a Lilian Saintcrow book, was a character who was apparently supposed to be empathic, but was emphatic instead. I guess she read others emotions very forcefully.
Kalen, if you check in American dictionaries, careen is now accepted with the meaning ‘to move rapidly and in an uncontrolled fashion, lurching from side to side’.
I am sure that it originated as an error for career, but it is evidently so commonly used in AE that the new meaning has made it into the dictionaries. In a British English dictionary, it still means only, ‘to clean the hull of a boat by turning it on its side and scraping it down’—from Latin carina, a hull.
🙂
Nubs, nubbins and (ugh) ‘clits’. Nubs and nubbins don’t bother me, though I much prefer the longer form: I am fine with clitoris, too, which seems to me to have some dignity. But clit turns me off violently. I hate the word. I find it not only unromantic, but anti-erotic. Nasty, ugly, vulgar little word.
Which all goes to show that you can’t please all your readers all of the time! Any terminology used by a writer in these difficult contexts is going to resonate well with some readers (particularly those whose cultural and generational background matches the author’s own), and will infuriate some others, either by seeming fluffy and euphemistic, or crude, or just plain silly. All that a writer can do is to be consistent and true to herself. She is bound to offend somebody, but that’s life, right? I have managed to offend people here occasionally by writing things that would be the common currency of friendly conversation in the circles in which I move. We all just have to live with it.
But I thought I’d let you lot know that clit (gosh, I find it harder to type than cunt) is not universally approved.
😉
NERD ALERT!
According to Merriam-Webster, “careen” comes from the Middle French word “carine”, (ca. 1583) and refers to the side of a ship.
It originally meant putting a ship over on its side in order to clean it. Thus, the derivative definition about lurching to the side.
Yay for etymology!!
On behalf of the male readership:
Ouch.
Ouch ouch ouch.
May it be as Our Hostess has decreed (and I think I’ll avoid the BDSM works that postulate characters who like the described experience….).
[spamword: walked22. More walking than any hero would be doing after having been lathed.]
The one that drives me crazy is someone who’s both prone AND facing upward. How do they manage that? prone = face down, lying on your belly. Lying on your back is supine.
Per OED: “A ship is said to careen when she inclines to one side, or lies over when sailing on a wind” (1763). I’ve always thought of this as turning, but I can see that I’m misconstruing the leaning for turning. But career is to run at an all out gallop, so I don’t see what that has to do with lurching from side to side (whereas I do see what careening has to do with such a motion).
Yes!! Down with the ‘nubbin’!!! That word is awful, and it should never be written, must less be used in the following combinations: “nubbin of womanhood”; “nubbin of pleasure”; “her womanly nubbin”; and worst of all “vaginal nubbin” (which I can’t for the life of me remember where I read, but I immediately put the book in my discard pile after saying, “ewwwww!” for about a day or so).
And, incidentally, doesn’t the use of “lave” give anyone else the image of a cat grooming itself? Doesn’t seem like a very good blowjob technique to me, although the manjunk would be spotless and tangle free.
manroot
really, is there anything worse? something that would actually deserve to be lathed (and made of the right substance, as well!)
All I can think when I see “lathe” used in reference to a penis is that they are taking the whole “ribbed for her pleasure” thing a bit too far.
Had to post b/c spam word is ball32 and I’m thinking if she really did lathe his you-know-what it would be in 32 pieces.
On the plus side…I didn’t use ““vaginal nubbin” cause EEEWWW
oh thank you for making me laugh today!!!!!!! and I agree, please, can we dispense with ‘nubbin’? It sounds silly and naive in an oh-so-not-good way.
I had thought the use of careen in a ‘bouncing off the walls madly’ sense was not derived from ‘career’ but was a conflation with ‘carom’. Carom dates to 1779 and, besides being a sort of shot in billiards, is used in the sense of ‘a rebounding, especially at an angle’.
@AgTigress. Thank you. I thought I was the only one.
The adjective carinated is widely used in certain classes of archaeological description, and refers to a ‘keeled’ profile – a sharp change of angle, as in the keel of a boat. This is more directly derived from the Latin than the verb careen.
I hadn’t thought of carom as another source of confusion, but it may well be in the mix there somewhere, along with careen and career.
The point I was making originally was simply that there are far more and greater differences between American and British/Commonwealth usage than many writers and readers realise. Careen is just one minor, but sometimes disconcerting, example.
Don’t get me started on the use and meaning of quite, for example. Just don’t tell a Brit that you found her new book ‘quite good’ if you want to flatter her…
It’s a shame the erotic lexicon is so very limited. I’m relatively new to this genre, but it seems to me that there is an extreme overabundance of nipping and laving. It’s to the point now that when I’m being intimate with my significant other I wonder about it: “Should I being doing more nipping right now? And how’s my laving? Have I laved enought yet? What’s better, stationary laving, say at the throat, or the use of laving to get from point A to point B – maybe from the chest to, you know, the root of the nubbin….”
“She lathed his *rod until it became a nubbin…”
* or “shaft” or “manroot” or “sabre” or “love-cleaver”
Lets become a little more adroit with language and add some better (and more sensible) phrases to the lexicon.
Good grief! Gonna spring this “lathing” on my husband when he’s making like a couch potato in front of the tv tonight, and watch him squirm, LOL.
I have to add my personal favorite in the spellcheck fail stakes: “neither-hole” instead of “nether-hole”. Kinda hard for the guy to be having sex if he’s sticking it in “neither hole”, don’t you think?
Um, yes. It was a spell check mistake – actually, a failure to read spell check before hitting “change.” Still makes me blush to think about it. The Hub thought it was funny (it wasn’t!) because I’m scared to death of all his woodworking tools, including the lathe – convinced I’ll lose a couple fingers if I ever try to use them. Apparently, there are a lot of chick wood turners.
A lesson in humility, and one to be remembered next time I run across “neither hole” or “rapid dog” in someone else’s work. HOWEVER…if two or more such malapropisms pop up in one book, then it’s not spell check’s fault, is it?
I recently proofed an ms in which the author kept using “smarted” as a verb meaning to crack sarcastically—mouthed off, whatever. I kept trying to explain that “to smart” means to cause or to feel a sharp pain. I’ve no knowledge of smart, as a verb, meaning to crack wise. Don’t think the author believed me.
Oh – and “effect” and “affect”, which are misused frequently across all genres.
close47 – actually, I am close to 47, and it smarts.
“love-cleaver”????? Surely not. Please. Ouch. Many ouches. Hmmm, all those “love-cleavers” running around, a girl WOULD need a sturdy chastity belt now, wouldn’t she?
Wait wait wait…. Did someone refer to man junk in a romance novel as a nubbin? REALLY????? REALLY REALLY?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!
*dies laughing*
*resurrects self*
Wait… was this nubbin-y fellow the villain? Cause I totally could see so many small dick jokes fostered upon the evil doer.
HAHAHA—it’s better than “salami”.
I’ve run across “manroot” in a handful of medievals. All I could think of was the turnip shaped like a “thingy” in Blackadder.
There are two separate issues here. The one that Sarah raised is a matter of imperfect knowledge and understanding of language, something that is a serious flaw in a professional writer. Confusion between totally different words like lathe and lave, which are not even homophones, or effect and affect, betrays a degree of incompetence in either the writer or the editor, or both. We all make mistakes, and one or two mistakes like that may, perhaps, be forgiven, but they really should not appear at all in published works that have been edited and proofread. Someone should have picked up on them and corrected them before they made it into print.
The other issue is far more complex: the differences between major English dialects, and the continual evolution of language can both lead to usages that appear incorrect or jarring to some readers, though they not, in fact, wrong. My example of careen was only one of many where I have thought that an author had made an ridiculous error, only to discover that the usage was acceptable in AE. Spelling, vocabulary, definitions, punctuation and syntax all differ in some respects between AE and BE and its relatives. Even when there are no obvious confusions of meaning, this can lead to the style of a writer being perceived very differently by readers.
Tigress: your point is well taken, but sometimes things that should happen in the chain of custody prior to publication do not. I still remember seeing “penile colony” in a BDB book – I know JR Ward knows the diff b/t penile and penal, and I’m sure the Signet copy eds and proofreaders do as well. Unfortunately, no software can substitute for human readers, and human readers are human, which means they occasionally f** up.
doing29 – i’m doing 29 things in addition to this, because the Diva came home from Granma’s tonight and deprogramming takes a while.
Funny you should mention lathes…
My aunt runs sex education classes for teenagers. She had a wooden educational aid supplied by Mates to help demonstrate how to use a condom, but they only included one in the kit. Wanting a few more to share around the class, she asked my dad, who’s a woodturner, if he could copy the original.
This was the (NSFW) result.
AgTigress: I’d say three issues, because I think at least a few of the malapropisms noted above arise from imperfect copyediting on the publisher’s end. (The “empathic/emphatic” example noted above comes to mind.) That gets us into the whole economics-of-modern-publishing can of worms, which is a different kind of problem entirely, but I think it’s a contributing element.
Ms Manna, you have proven that a man can lathe wood and the result is not a nubbin.
@Ms Manna: Your dad should consider opening an etsy store because there’s a market for those. For realz—-wooden adult toys not only sell, they’re expensive.
I’ve got to show those to my husband – look honey, a new project…
At one point in my life, I knew that “effect” is a noun and “affect” is a verb. And then I discovered that in psychology, “affect” is a noun. I further I discovered that “effect” can be used as a verb, as in “to effect change”.
This morning, I was trying to write the word “write”. And I had to erase “wright”, “right” AND “rite” before the caffeine kicked in and I got it, erm, correct. Oh, what a humbling day.
kinseyholley: For what it’s worth, I have hear the phrasal verb “to smart off” used as a colloquial synomyn for “to speak sarcastically” or “to crack wise.” I believe it’s related to the descriptive term “smart-mouthed.” Maybe that’s what the author you whose work you were proofing was thinking of/misusing? I don’t think the usage would work as a dialogue attribution, actually; the only way I’ve never heard “to smart off” used is in the third person, as in (parent about child): “And then she smarted off, and I sent her to her room.” It also sounds a bit juvenile to me, too, now that I think of it—can’t imagine describing a mature adult as “smarting off,” unless I were being just slightly insulting or condescending.
Maybe it’s a regional idiom, possibly midwestern-urban USA?
that’s an interesting idea Mary – yes, it was a dialog tag, as in “I don’t think so buddy,” she smarted”—but maybe it is a regional thing.
I see these two frequently in Romances—
A flout/flaunt confusion. I’m almost fond if this one. There’s a sort of ‘here it comes again’ moment.
The odd inability to conjugate the verb, ‘to tread,’ (almost always followed by ‘the boards’ when it is wrong.)
the one that really drives me nuts is craven, and I’ve seen it a lot in contests I’ve judged. I think some paranormal writers think it sounds paranormal-ish (maybe because of raven? Old Ed Poe?) and/or historical writers think it sounds regal or something, but it means contemptible coward.
So Lord Craven should NOT be the hero. Just . . . no. Unless you plan to lathe him, in which case he’ll probably cry.
Actually, I have to ask about the medieval clitoris/nub issue, too. Since my old time fella is obviously not going to call it a clitoris, is nub an acceptable substitute? What word would you, the readers, find both sexy and authentic? HE NEEDS TO KNOW. ELSE HOW IS HE TO GIVE THE LADY A HANDJOB? Sob.
does97—well, yes, on average Sagramore DOES try to do 97 or so a week. >_>
As for nub/nubbin…I present a list of alternatives…
Erm…
Only one I can think of is ‘pink pearl’, with any other p-words you want in there.
I suppose you could hit up some kind of online thesaurus for slang and euphemisms, but I think that might be cheating…
Oh God… Is she a beaver? Is she gnawing on him until she has a match for the dining room table leg that broke off?
:::shudders:::