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.”
And my family has threatened to disown me if I shout at the tv screen one more time, “Numbnuts! Grammarless idiots! It’s ‘More Movie. Fewer Commercials’ not ‘Less Commercials’!”
This is the not even the first season that TBS has given us that particular horror on screen and I’m ready to swear off tv movies completely.
I don’t know if this is a British Commonwealth vs US English problem, either, but I had to stop reading Jude Devereaux when she had a book that was full of people wearing broaches.
Yes, it sounds like broach, but it’s brooch.
Gwynnyd, might as well give up, it’s a ubiquitous mistake. I grumble about it at the grocery store. Then again, I’m driven to distraction by the flagrant misuse of apostrophes. “Get your ticket’s here!” and “The dog bit it’s own leg off” and such. A town in England recently decided not to use apostrophes at all in any municipal signs henceforth, because no one was certain of correct usage.
Barbarians.
Well, strictly speaking he doesn’t need to know what to call it. He only needs to know were it is and what to do with it and that doesn’t require a name.
Unfortunately that doesn’t help you describe the action and I have nothing helpful to offer there. Sorry.
Thank you SB Sarah and fellow Bitches for a great Saturday laugh!
Suze, I hate to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure that broach used to be an acceptable alternative spelling of brooch. I can’t cite sources, but I am absolutely certain that I have seen it in respectable published non-fiction of the 19th century.
It should not be used today, of course, because it is, at best, archaic, but using an outmoded spelling is not as culpable as using completely the wrong word!
😉
My guess about what to call the clitoris in the Middle Ages (or even in the early 20th century, come to that) is that there was no word for it, because one simply did not speak of such things (assuming one was even aware of its existence in the first place).
It is not so long ago since many ordinary people who enjoyed perfectly satisfactory sexual relations actually had no words for many of the things they had and did, so they did not, and could not, talk about them. As someone said above, you certainly do not have to know the word for something in order to be able to do it! Only the better educated knew the formal words for the parts of the genitalia, and the only other words were vulgar ones that many well-brought-up persons of both sexes simply could not bring themselves to utter. Words like cock and cunt were familiar, but many adults found them powerful anti-aphrodisiacs, a sure way of ruining the mood rather than promoting it, and would certainly not have used them. Even today, many women, especially, have great difficulty communicating with medical professionals, because they do not know words like vulva and vagina, and cannot bring themselves to say the vulgar words, especially to a doctor. They fall back on weak euphemisms (‘front passage’) or on the childish—a common childish BE expression for the vagina is ‘front bottom’.
The answer that was found by couples who wanted to talk about their sexual activities was usually to create their own private vocabulary, for example by giving personal names to their genitals and sometimes by inventing completely new words.
The readiness to talk openly about sexual matters is generally post-1960s. An author can describe sexual activities in whatever vocabulary seems good to her, but when it comes to dialogue, she must consider whether her characters would actually have used words at all. In many cases, the answer will have been ‘no’.
Just to add to what I said above, as far as I am aware, there is no traditional vulgar word for the clitoris: it has been completely ignored. I could write a lot more about this, and about the way in which specialists in sexual medicine in the late Victorian period perceived that part of the female body, but I’ll spare you all.
I discovered the term “tickler” which is a translation of a German term used in the 18c. Good enough for me. There are many archaic slang words for female genitalia (usually nasty, many baffling, and you have the idea that few men had the nerve to get down there and have a good look). So this suggests to me that women knew about the clitoris but didn’t bother to name something so familiar and user-friendly; yet if men had named it that would mean they’d have to acknowledge its existence.
I have a personal vendetta against the term “pebbled nub” which is wrong in oh so many ways.
Forgot to add: My particular horror is junction of her thighs, particularly when some lucky guy is laving it. Presumably before his big Choo Choo of Love comes steaming in.
does67. How did you find out?
Cunt is a good solid word, from Old English (quente).
Pussy is just too, well…..wussy!
Like the organ itself!
Thank you for this post. It’s one of my pet peeves.
I point out the lathed/laved error to an author once. She blamed it on her voice recognition software.
Its etymology is respectable enough, but it is not a euphonious word (unlike the variant queynt), nor is it easy for anyone of my generation to set aside the vast weight of negative associations that it carries. I am a lot more comfortable with quim or with cunny: these terms are not habitually hurled as insults by drunken brawlers.
Puss/pussy is an interesting one; I don’t find it ‘wussy’. It was a colloquial term for a hare or rabbit, a coney, which, of course, is pronounced cunny.
Again, we see how the perception of vocabulary varies according to dialect and generation, with the different associations involved. Some people—and that means, some readers—will respond quite as negatively to the old, blunt sex words as younger people do to the terms of racial abuse that are now outlawed.
I’ll admit it, I love power tools and watching shows about remodeling and woodworking. I’ve even made a few things. So I’m pretty familiar with the term lathe. I’ve seen it used a few times and it just jumps out at me. It makes me laugh because I’m sure the author was going for laved and just got it so wrong, but annoys me for the same reason.
LOL! Whom or what did she blame for failing to spot it when proof-reading? 🙂
As heardwords there is certainly a danger of confusion, and in some dialects (including Cockney and SE England ‘Estuary English’) , lathe might actually be pronounced lave —though not vice versa. This sound-change affects both phonemes that are spelt th: ‘thanks’ is frequently pronounced ‘fanks’ and ‘mother’, ‘muvver’ in these regional/social dialects. But the process of writing, reading and checking should override the problems that can arise from homophones or near-homophones. Avoiding pitfalls of this kind should be part of the craft of writing.
Sorry for typo! Why can’t we EDIT any more?
I have got to stop reading this when my family is around; I *cannot* explain all the snorts and giggles to my kids… : )
Adding to the nipples discussion, I recently read something that called them her “sentient flesh” which I found slightly creepy.
And lastly, my favorite language pet peeve is the word “literally” which is so rarely used correctly. If her pants are “literally” on fire, he should get a fire extinguisher, not a hard-on. Though I guess in both cases, he’d want to get the pants off of her…
I find myself very often irritated by misused/misspelled idioms and colloquialisms, homonym errors and such, BUT I can’t bring myself to blame the author entirely.
This is an editor/copyeditor/proofreader’s job. What does it say about the education of the people who are supposed to be professionals at the language of English when so many books get by with these? They’re supposed to know this stuff and, hopefully, educate the author so it won’t happen again.
Please, no more “pebbled nub.” Serious ICK factor. It brings to mind a pebble with bumps all over it. Which makes me think that the “nub” is “pebbled” due to an STD. EW!
The term “tickler” was still in use in sex-ed in the 80s when I went to school. Nobody used the latin term then.
My pet peeve is wrong use of contractions, their-they’re (and there!) and your-you’re. Argh. And I’m not even a native speaker – is this hypocritical? My English teacher is surely spinning in her grave (not mounted on a lathe, I hope).
OK. Prehensile nipples? Lost of mental images of swinging though the trees by the nipples and going though my head.
I think I am out of the look of the lingo. I can’t even figure out what word the author was wanting!
One error I’ve noticed more and more in recent years is the use of “alright” for “all right”, especially in British English. The Kids Are Alright is one obvious example, though I’ve run across many, many uses in mainstream fiction as well.
I have a feeling that this one gets by a lot of editors who just don’t realize it’s incorrect, and in all fairness, it seems to have become acceptable through continued use, though I can recall my elementary school teachers (1970’s vintage) harping on how egregious it was.
Well, yes and no. Certainly it is perfectly true that any published text has been through many hands, and that not all the infelicities or errors should therefore be attributed to the author. At the same time, a professional writer should be able to submit a manuscript which is essentially clean, complete and correct. Naturally nobody can guarantee that there will not be a single error, but the text should not be a mess that requires the kind of attention appropriate for an essay by a scatterbrained teenager.
The editors, copy-editors and proof-readers (who include the author, after all) are supposed to pick up on a variety of problems, including any discrepancy between the author’s text and the publisher’s house-style. When I write the word analyse, because I always use the most usual and familiar BE spelling, but my publisher’s house-style happens to favour analyze, my copy-editor changes it, no doubt using a global ‘find and replace’. When I use more commas than my editor can bear, he or she changes some of them to brackets or em-dashes (and I change some of them back again 🙂 ) But I hope that nothing I have written is technically, grammatically incorrect: the changes that are made, some of which I accept meekly, have to do with points of style, not correctness. There may occasionally be situations where an actual mistake has been made, and the editor is the one who saves one from looking a fool. Editors who take a correct text and insert errors into it come into a different category altogether.
I have written for American publishers when my British spelling and punctuation have been left untouched, and others (usually journals) where the editor has changed grey to gray , colour to color and inserted the ‘Oxford’ comma into lists: but none of these things has to do with an imperfect grasp of the standard written English of one’s own region. It is simply about imposing an integrated house-style.
Elizabeth —it is encroaching, and the descriptivists will accept it soon, on the analogy of already , altogether and so on. I know that all ready and all together don’t mean the same things as those contracted words, but there is a lot of confusion, and this kind of contraction seems to have a long history in English.
I would never use ‘alright’, but then I am a grumpy old woman. AE usages tend to seep into BE when we aren’t watching, and I suppose we should welcome trends that keep global English together a bit, so we can understand each other up to a point.
🙂
Right. So all the people involved don’t know the difference between lathe and lave?
You know, we all have gaps in the education of our own language. For instance, I didn’t know until the other day that it was “like a trouper,” and not “like a trooper.”
I don’t have a difficulty with one out of four people (author, editor, copyeditor/proofreader) not knowing lathe v lave. I have a real problem with ALL FOUR people not knowing.
As for house style, that’s another matter entirely. I know one house’s style is “alright” over “all right” and a period/comma outside quote marks (which is not standard American grammar). I would CRINGE to apply that style. When I see that in that house’s books (even though I KNOW it’s their house style), I count it as an error in my head.
There are autocorrects for such things as British/American spellings, so that’s not a difficult problem to remedy.
I agree with you. I’ve come across a few of these (with regard to friends who are reading galleys) and I shudder.
You’d be surprised! I have everything possible on the computer set on ‘English, UK’, but it still takes a while to convince Word that I really, really do want to spell jewellery like that, not jewelry! The spelling I want has to have been inserted into my personal thesaurus, even though it is the standard BE spelling. ‘Jewelry’ is also acceptable in BE, so Word ignores the standard BE spelling in favour of the standard AE, even when it, and the whole computer, is set on UK English.
Yes, we do all have gaps in our own knowledge, however knowledgeable and experienced we are, and this is where good editors (and other readers) can be a boon and a blessing. But when author, general editor, copy-editor, sundry readers and proof-readers all fail to pick up on a very obvious error, then one can only assume that people are not paying much attention. Maybe they are not actually reading the text with close attention?
On a non-grammatical error, did I ever mention the 1980s category romance where the author described new-born kittens as naked and hairless, like baby mice? That didn’t ‘alf take me aback, I can tell you! Why introduce baby kittens into the story if you don’t know anything about them? And would one not think that other pre-publication readers would have noticed? Nope!
😉
And take pity on us poor Canadians, whose correct English seems to be an inconsistent mix of the two, with some Frenglish thrown in. If I set my computer for BE, I get -ise and other weirdness, which I don’t like, and if I set it for AE, it takes away all my honour, colour, and neighbours. So irritating.
I use a program (which is not a programme) at work that requires us to use the American date format of mm/dd/yyyy, because it gets all confused and frozen up by the correct yyyy/mm/dd (yes, dammit, year-month-day is CORRECT! Everybody else is wrong!)
And I have to say that, long before I gave up on the Anita Blake series as unreadable, it used to drive me crazy when she kept saying “Alright.” That’s not all right with me.
Ah, we all know that Canadians are a law unto themselves!
😀
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Yes, that is another thing that makes me crazy. If the people who insisted on using “alright” would agree on using it consistently to add meaning to the written word, I might be more ready to accept it as proper usage.
No one thinks that “they were already to go” or “he gathered the toys altogether” is correct usage, do they? Why would anyone expect me to accept “alright” as meaning either satisfactory or correct? Must I use context to distinguish them? Maybe if they standardized alright as an adverb meaning “satisfactory and all right as the collective noun meaning “correct” even the old sticklers like me could go for it.
Next up – alwrong, alclear, alstar…
No it is dd/mm/yyyy Everyone else is wrong!!
I had a reader from Poland email to ask me where I was from (publishing fiction online). She said, “Your spelling is British, but your usage is American. Where exactly do you live?”
I thought it was a masterly summation of Canadian English, actually!
I lathe my ex- once.
I would also recommend against describing the heroine as having a “taught abdomen,” unless you’re willing to describe the curriculum.
Is it possible that a lot of the copy-editing functions have been assigned to spell-check modules by publishers as a way of reducing costs by reducing actual human staff?
Your cynicism dismays me. No, wait, that’s not it. The extreme likelihood of your being right on the mark about that dismays me.
Just to put another perspective out there, way back in the mid-90’s, I was reading a training journal (for industry training departments) article that said, essentially, we now have generations of tv-watchers teaching other generations of tv-watchers to read and write. The only way to learn to properly string words together is to read them properly strung together. If you grow up on tv and poorly-written/edited stuff, you have no way of knowing correct spelling, grammar, usage, and elegant flow of words.
I would add that ppl hu txt & cnt t8k tm 2 spl will also have big problems with correct word selection. (Not being much of a texter, I have no idea if that’s correct text-speak.)
Hey, in American Gods a woman actually eats a man with her vagina. Ih the first chapter. Good times.
Actually, that’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. Not whatcha might call a romance…
Hey, in American Gods a woman actually eats a man with her vagina. In the first chapter. Good times.
Actually, that’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. Not whatcha might call a romance.
This crops up in various forms in many cultures and times— the vagina dentata.
American Gods is possibly my favorite book of all time. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and people seem either to love or hate it—no middle ground. It doesn’t fit the traditional urban fantasy mold—for one thing it’s very slow-moving, and for another the hero is extremely passive up until the very end of the story. If you can make it through, it’s a rewarding journey.
To return to the subject of grammatically unaware copy-editors, I recall reading on another website some time ago that many publishing companies out-source their copy editing to countries such as India to save on cost; the downside, of course, is that the manuscripts are being proofread by people who learned English as a second language and may be unfamiliar with all the nuances of the language. Thoughts?
While I have reservations about the tendency to out-source services abroad in order to save money, the language issue is not quite what one might expect in India. On the whole, I think I might be slightly more confident about a reasonably well-educated Indian proof-reading a book than many a young Brit.
Many middle-class Indians learn English and their other language virtually simultaneously, because English is not merely taught in schools: it is widely used in everyday public life as a lingua franca to avert the difficulties posed by scores of regional languages in the country. Children therefore hear older members of their family using English as a matter of course, so they know it well. However, English has been present in the sub-continent for so long— three centuries—that it has naturally developed its own dialect characteristics, and Indian English has not only vocabulary differencesm, but also some syntactical peculiarities. Its historical links are with British English, of course, though that may be changing a bit these days.
I would certainly expect any literate middle-class Indian, let alone one working as an editor, to know the difference between lathe and lave.
I second that in the strongest possible way. I’ve said a few times that if you make a living from words, you should know how to use them properly. I get very annoyed with our local newspaper because it often appears that neither the journalists nor the editors realize this. However, in typing out the one example that comes to mind, I realize that I sound horrifyingly pedantic so I deleted it.
I would like to point out, however, that every time I see “loose” for “lose”, my teeth grind. How can anyone make that mistake? They don’t even sound the same! (It can lead to comedy gold, however, like the comment I read earlier this morning on a different site from a girl who, at the age of 22, decided to “loose her virginity”.)
I must be one of the few standing in the middle, then. My response to my husband’s, “Well, how was it?” was “Eh…it was okay.”