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.”
Happens all the time – writers write “could care less” when the phrase is “couldn’t care less”. Drives. me. crazy.
I recently learned that the phrase is actually “if you think that, you’ve got another think coming.” Although, I’ll argue to my grave that “if you think that, you’ve got another thing coming” makes sense as well. If you think thought A is true, when event B occurs, the thing you were expecting to happen based on thought A doesn’t happen, so you had another thing coming. I can live with this.
Oh man, I see this all the time on professional writers’ blogs and it makes me insane!!
I can forgive it if it’s an occasional oops. I’ve hit keys one too many times and not caught it, but when it’s ALL THE TIME, I get highly annoyed.
most hilarious thing i’ve read this month!
@Lynn M. That phrase drives me nuts (“if you think that, you’ve got another think coming”). I know that’s the correct version (you’ve got another think coming= think again), but it just doesn’t flow well for me because, to me, ‘think’ is a verb, never a noun.
Amen, sisters!
Wow. I do enjoy a good visual example, but that one is CLASSIC. Thanks SBSarah.
ACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please take care of the nubbin. I always feel like there’s an ear of corn between my legs. ~sigh~
Dr Seuss, anyone? “Oh, the thinks you can think”?
More likely, it goes like this:
Author either doesn’t know the difference, or makes a spell-checker mistake, or her mind is going faster than her fingers on her keyboard.
Author/editors end up missing it because it’s natural for people to read what their mind expects to see on the page rather than what’s actually there. Yes, the job of an editor is to see past that, and most of them are very good at it, but they aren’t machines—-things will slip past them now and then.
So, yeah, ouch, and not a good mistake to make! But as long as it’s one error in a book and not one of a bunch, I’d at least try to give the author the benefit of the doubt. 🙂 When they make that substitution repeatedly, however, all bets are off!
“come78”—-dang, that’s a lot of times!
Heather: Exactly.
To Lathe – hum – I wouldn’t mind doing that to my cheating ex-husband, but it would never do for the magnificent men I write into my books. – Oh, and I have a lathe and have turned more than one piece of wood. I never thought of it in terms of a man before. I don’t think you could turn a piece of wood into the interesting bits without a lot of hand work, but that is another story.
Hear, hear!
That’s as in “listen”, not “this place”. Of course, if you’re playing a ball game or something, or are trying try attract SB Sarah’s attention on a book giveaway thread, then using “Here! Here!” is fine.
Just sayin’.
@Mary and kinseyholley: I grew up in the Midwest and have lived on the E. Coast (US) for 14 years, and I have never heard “smarted” used outside of referencing pain. If “smarted” is a regional vernacular, it’s new, or not from the mid west/east coast.
I have. I’m smack in the middle of the heartland and I hear it all the time and have for years and years.
Moving along . . .
Just today I saw “visa-vi” for “vis-à-vis.”
I live smack dab in the heart of the midwest and I hear “smart off” all the time. Use it all the time, too.
On a related note, I saw “vis-à-vis” spelled “visa-vi” on an author blog, supposedly quoting an agent.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across that one before. My particular pet peeve, which I see a lot thanks to my unfortunate slashfic addiction is the use of “withered” for “writhed”. If he’s withering, someone’s doing something wrong!
Okay, here’s one I saw again today. I’ve come across it a lot lately, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s a regional variation going on.
Using the word “ancestors” when the author clearly means “descendants”. In my universe, ancestors are the people you come from, and are all dead by now. They’re your great-grandparents’ great-grandparents.
So when you have a character talking about how your ancestors will one day appreciate your actions, ur doin’ it wrong. Your ancestors are dead. They will never care about or be affected by what you do. Your descendants, on the other hand, may well curse or bless you for introducing alien chromosomes into the family genome.
LOL
I used to work in a woodshop (well, I was their accountant) and I saw a lathe in action…OUCHEE.
Dialects, dialects! I’m southern & I to this very day believe it is a conspiracy to try to make us believe that P-I-N and P-E-N are pronounced differently. And how about tumped. It is an American regionalism I’ve used all my life until my midwestern husband didn’t know what I meant…you know, be careful or you’ll tump that over. Though it does look funny written out. I’ve never seen it written, only spoken. It means a combination of dump out and tip over. It IMPLIES accidently tipping something over until the content tumble out. Routinely yelled at us kids by our mother and grandmother.
And the discussion of cunt, clit, whatever. A lot of this is connotation, rather than dennotation. When cunt is used as a swear word to denograte a woman its hard to be turned on when the hero calls uses it in sex talk. Words in use take on a load of connotation, rather than their meaning. BE, AE,CE, IE—all diferent languages. Hey what does a biscuit mean to you guys—yummy baking powder buttery, steamy, oozing butter and jam or covered in yummy cream gravy, or a hard baked sweet cracker. What else is this OED but a way to understand Shakespeare’s bawdy puns? Til i studied him in college, I never knew so many common words and phrase were “talking dirty”
Fun post, now let’s have a campaign to have gay mean happy and carefree. Love that word which has so unfairly been coopted for another “meaning”.
So I’m coming into this really late. . . sorry. But I had to interject: many, perhaps all, ancient people had a pretty good understanding of female sexual anatomy. The word “clitoris” was actually coined by an Italian anatomist in the 1500s who was terribly proud that he had “discovered” something so remarkably useful for seducing women. Those Renaissance Italians and their discoveries! But I know it was also detailed in the Kama Sutra and other ancient sexual writings; the Greeks certainly knew, and the Egyptians. SMART medieval men would have made it their business to find out. Either that, or risk the medieval lathe. Anyway, here’s a link. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clitoris
I find it useful, when writing historical sex scenes, to search my modern term + “archaic term” or “archaic dictionary” or something similar. I often find a cornucopia of wonderful words to use that are not at all hackneyed. Or I pick up Fanny Hill (freely available on Gutenberg.org) and re-read it—one of the dirtiest books ever written without a single bad word, if I remember right.
@mingqi: “@Lynn M. That phrase drives me nuts”
And that phrase always reminds me of this:
Sailor: Cap’n, you have a steering wheel stuck in your pants.
Pirate Captain: Yarr, it’s drivin’ me nuts!