This delightful and fascinating book explains the origins and historical development of words about love and sex. Morton covers it all: words for wooing, words for genitalia, words for sexual orientation, words for "the deed" itself, and hundreds more. What flower takes its name from the human testicle? Is your husband rantallion? Does your wife sport a merkin? What's a wittol, and why were they once drummed out of town while sitting backwards on a horse? Is sacofricosis a crime, a disease or a dinner entrée? Find out as Morton roams through centuries of etymological tidbits and lore. Diligently researched and light-hearted, The Lover's Tongue is the perfect book for lovers and language-lovers alike.
Insomniac Press
ISBN: 1-894663-51-9
USA $16.95 CAN $21.95 UK £9.95

Media should contact
mike@insomniacpress.com for interviews or review copies

Praise for The Lover's Tongue

Print reviews and interviews

Read two excerpts

MP3s of the author discussing Penis Words or Masturbation Words on CBC

Possible story angles and interview questions

About the author

Contact the author: mark@wordhistories.com

Praise for The Lover's Tongue

"As scholarly as it is wildly entertaining, The Lover's Tongue is a word lover's wet dream. I'm still fanning myself!" -- Martha Barnette, author of Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies: A Feast for Language Lovers

"This is an enthralling study of the strange and wonderful language--whether standard or slangy--that has come to describe the myriad aspects of that ever-alluring pastime: sex. Mark Morton has dug deep and devotedly for the etymologies -- the 'stories behind the words' -- and come up with much that is precious. The Lover's Tongue...puts a new shine on those old 'dirty words.' We are all, whether professional wordsmiths or amateur lovers of language, in his debt." -- Jonathon Green, author of Cassell's Dictionary of Slang

"In The Lover's Tongue, Mark Morton applies his justly famous knowledge of and passion for word histories to a subject close to our hearts -- from a few inches to a couple of feet away. Morton's merry romp establishes him as one of the world's leading sexicographers." -- Richard Lederer, author of The Miracle of Language

"I’m thrilled that now there is such a wonderful resource in The Lover’s Tongue. I now finally know where the term 'jacking off'comes from and what 'furtling' is! Eloquently written and thoroughly researched, my copy is going right beside my Oxford dictionary!" -- Josey Vogels, author of the nationally syndicated sex and relationships column, My Messy Bedroom

"There are dozens of linguistic jewels sprinkled through Morton's breezily readable text....The Lover's Tongue may well be the most comprehensive etymological treatment [of sex words]" -- Michael Posner, The Globe and Mail

"Brainy smut for word nerds....Male readers will embrace new nicknames for their members, and female readers will swoon over a smart guy talking about talking dirty." -- Beth Hitchcock, Saturday Night Magazine

"The Lover's Tongue is full of fascinating or amusing kernels of information….should ever you wish to convert a lover or spouse to the strange and wonderful delights of naughty language, hand him or her this book." -- Douglas J. Johnston, The Winnipeg Free Press

"Fun, sexy and laugh-out-loud funny. This is linguistic entertainment at its best....For your ribald friend, this will make a perfect holiday gift." -- Karen Bisken, The Link

"Morton is excellent at discussing a word's derivation....If you are interested in the origin and meaning of sex and love words, and you enjoy a scholarly yet punny style and exhaustive research, and you like to learn how clusters of words are related, you must have The Lover's Tongue." -- Melanie Jeanes and Mike Crowley, Take Our Word For It

"Morton is the perfect guide for what, in other hands, could have been a cheesy, pun-filled look at dirty words. Instead, this book is an engaging and informative look at the etymology of words and phrases." -- H. J. Kirchhoff, The Globe and Mail

"Wittily written and painstakingly researched, this is more of a handy reference book than a sit-down straight read, and a great tool for all lovers of language, not to mention aspiring erotic romance writers." -- Clare-Marie Gosse, The Halifax Coast

"Morton has produced a wonderful text on the philology of the language of love and sex….It is clear that he enjoyed putting together this book as much as it is enjoyable to read." -- Trudi Wright, The Peer Review

In 2004, The Lovers Tongue won the
Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Nonfiction

In 2005, foreign rights to The Lover's Tongue were purchased by Atlantic Books, and the book was published in the United Kingdom as Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk. Reviews of that edition include the following:

"Absolutely correct and without fault, beautifully prepared and presented....The reader can hardly fail to be delighted." -- Belle De Jour, The London Times

"No other book offers such a compendious and up-to-date trove of erotic etymology." -- Michael Faber, The Manchester Guardian

"Reading his estimate that the average orgasm lasts five seconds, I began to feel rueful and understand why Canada is underpopulated." -- Jim McCue, the London Sunday Telegraph

About the Author

Mark Morton was born and raised in one of the flattest and coldest parts of the planet: the middle of the Canadian prairies. Yearning for something vertical, he headed east to Toronto, where – in the shadow of the CN Tower – he completed his Ph.D. in sixteenth-century literature. From there he moseyed to France, where he taught at a university on the Cote d’Azur. Eventually growing tired of poodles and cheese, he returned to Canada to become a professor of English literature at the University of Winnipeg and then Instructional Program Manager at the University of Waterloo. His previous books include Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities, which was nominated for an international Julia Child Award, and The End: Closing Words for a Millennium. His latest book is The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex. He also writes a quarterly column for Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture published by the University of California Press, and is the resident language maven for Canada’s national radio corporation, CBC Radio. He and his wife, author Melanie Cameron, have four non-poodles.

Excerpt from Chapter Nine
Down in the Valley: Words for the Vagina, the Clitoris, et alia

Like twat, the word merkin was also used in the seventeenth century to signify the female pudendum. However, this sense of merkin was soon overshadowed by an earlier and alternative meaning: since the early seventeenth century, merkin had denoted a kind of pubic wig or genital toupee. The need for such an accoutrement was prompted by syphilis. One of the symptoms of that venereal disease is hair loss, not just on top, but down below, too. Originally, merkins seem to have been sported only by women: in 1671, for instance, Stephen Skinner defined merkin in his Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae as "pubes mulieris," Latin for "pubic hair of women." Likewise, a century later, Francis Grose included this definition in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: "Merkin, counterfeit hair for women's privy parts." Later on, the term came to denote pubic wigs for both sexes. Nowadays, merkin remains a word on the fringe of familiarity. It appears, for instance, as the first name of the American President in Stanley Kubrik's 1964 satirical film Dr. Strangelove. The bawdy surname of that President -- Muffley -- makes it clear that Kubrik was aware of the pubic wig sense of merkin. (Merkin is also used as a person's name in a 1962 Superman comic, where the Man of Steel tries to convince Lois Lane that her name is really Myrtle Merkin.) Still more recently, merkin has been proposed as a lesbian counterpart to the gay term beard; that is, just as a gay man pretending to have female partner is said to have a beard, so a lesbian pretending to have a male partner is said to have a merkin. In origin, the word merkin perhaps arose as a variant of malkin, a word that dates back to the thirteenth century, where it was used as a personal name for lower class women; one medieval source implies that it's a pet form of Matilda. The name Malkin also became a common name for cats, especially in the form Grimalkin, meaning grey cat. That form of the word is still familiar, thanks to Macbeth, where one of the three weird sisters cries out to an unseen feline spirit, "I come, Grimalkin!"

Excerpt from Chapter Five
My Swete Hurle Bawsy: Terms of Endearment

Many terms of endearment used by lovers have origins that that defy etymological investigation, sometimes because they are invented in imitation of the nonsense vocalizations that parents often produce when coddling their infants. Still, even though such vocalizations may be nonsense, they are not totally arbitrary: they tend to make use of internal rhyme, and certain syllables recur among the different formations: ums, for instance, is found in diddums (employed to soothe fussy babies since the nineteenth century), in pussums (applied to much beloved cats since 1924), and also in pookums, a traditional name for a teddy bear. That same syllable is also found in snookums, which originated around 1919 as a term of endearment applied by parent to child but soon adopted by spoony couples across North America. The snook part of that word is likely a nonsense formation, since it seems to have little connection to any of the earlier snooks in English: an obsolete snook that denoted a promontory of land; a zoological snook denoting the sergeant fish; and a pejorative snook that denotes a derisive gesture. Slawsy-gawsy was another term of endearment, now thankfully obsolete, which seems to have arisen as a nonsense formation. It was used, along with numerous other terms of endearment, in an sixteenth-century bawdy poem called "In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht" by Scottish poet William Dunbar. The woman in the poem addresses her lover thus:

My belly huddrun, my swete hurle bawsy,
My huny gukkis, my slawsy gawsy,

which means something like

My big lummox, my sweet unweened calf,
My honey cakes, my slawsy gawsy.

To this, her beloved replies,

My kyd, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,

which obviously needs no translation.

As strange as the phrases in Dunbar's poem might seem, they are nonetheless representative of most terms of endearment for the past thousand years. For instance, in slawsy gawsy and tylrie myrlie we see the use of rhyme which also characterizes still-current forms such as lovey-dovey, which appeared in 1819, and honey bunny, an early version of which can be traced back to a collection of poems called Pills to Purge Melancholy, published in 1719 by Thomas D'Urfey, in which a smitten lover exclaims the immortal line, "My Juggy, my Puggy, My Honey, my Bunny." Like the aforementioned Dunbar, D'Urfey also wrote bawdy verse, including this passage from a poem entitled "My Mistress' Cunny":

My mistress is a hive of bees
In yonder flowery Garden:
To her they come with loaden thighs,
To ease them of their burden.
As under the bee-hive lieth the wax,
And under the wax is honey,
So under her waist her belly is placed --
And under that, her cunny.

Other rhyming terms of endearment include the now-obsolete golpol and kicky-wicky. The first of these apeared in the sixteenth century as a shortened version of gold-poll, with poll being an old word for head. (In fact, when you take a poll you are, etymologically, counting heads.) The modern equivalent of golpol would be blondie, although that word is perhaps closer to being a term of objectification, rather than endearment. The second rhyming hypocorism, kicky-wicky, also dates back to the sixteenth century and perhaps derives from the French quelque chose, meaning something. That French phrase is also the source of the the English kickshaw, a culinary term denoting a fancy French dish, an exotic "something or other" as opposed to a more familiar and English meal.

Copyright 2003 Mark Morton

• The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2003
• The Boston Globe, October 12, 2003
• The Ottawa Sun, October 17, 2003
• Uptown, October 3, 2003
• Indiana Daily Student, October 21, 2003
• McMaster's Silhouette, October 23.2003
• Western Gazette, November 4, 2003
• Winnipeg Free Press, November 16, 2003
• Concordia's The Link, December 2, 2003
• The Vancouver Sun, December 13, 2003
• The Halifax Coast, February 12, 2004
• The Peer Review, Winter, 2004

Story Angles on The Lover's Tongue

Note to prospective interviewers: the author of The Lover's Tongue is well-practiced in discussing the following topics in a manner that is appropriate for daytime radio and television audiences!

Human nature
Love and sex are so fundamental to being human that the vocabulary of "the amorous arts" reveals a lot about who we are, and about our culture and values. The word "pudendum," for example, comes from a Latin word that means "to be ashamed," because the private parts of women were for many centuries construed in negative terms. Likewise, the now-obsolete word "merkin" reveals much about the social problems and sexual attitudes of the eighteenth century: in that century, a merkin was a genital wig worn by women who had lost their pubic hair due to syphilis. And the fact that there are presently over thirteen hundred slang names for the penis suggests how obsessed our culture has been with that organ.

The secret lives of words
We often take words for granted, and so we forget about how wonderful and strange they really are. Most words have origins that are fascinating and surprising. The word "testicle," for example, comes from a Latin source that meant "to witness," because the testicles were considered to be a "witness" to a man's virility. The words "testify" and "testament" come from the same Latin source, making them secret cousins of "testicle." Other words that might not seem sexual on the surface actually are. The word "bad," for example, comes from the Old English word "baedling," which denoted a male homosexual.

Sexism
Over the last twenty years, sexist language has to a great extent been eliminated from the English language: "firemen" have become "firefighters," and you don't often hear people referring to "lady doctors" or "male nurses." But when it comes to love and sex, gendered terms and sexist attitudes still prevail. "Stud" and "tomcat" tend to be used for men, and "slut" and "chick" for women; a grouchy woman will be called a "bitch," and a grouchy man a "bastard." These tendencies go back centuries, to when women were "shrews" and "jades," while men were "rakes" and "romeos." In many ways, the language of love and sex is the most conservative - or at least the most recalcitrant - aspect of the English language.

Gay and lesbian words
For centuries, the language used to describe homosexuality has been pejorative. In the Middle Ages, gay men were called "buggers," a word that derives from the word "Bulgaria," because homosexuality was considered as sinful as the religious heresies associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church of Bulgaria. Other words once used to denote homosexuals - such as "ferblet," "softling," "ingle," and "catamite" - also had negative connotations, even though some of them evolved from esteemed sources. "Catamite," for example, developed from "Ganymede," the name of beautiful young man who was adored by Zeus in Greek mythology. In modern times, the word "faggot" was applied to gay men because it had earlier been a derisive name for old women who earned a living by gathering "faggots," that is, firewood. More recently, the gay community has been successful in transforming words that were once intended to be hurtful - such as "queer" - into terms of proud self-identification.

Obscenity and taboo
Most cultures have words that they designate as taboo. Sometimes those words pertain to religion - like "God damn it!" - but often they involve sex. For many centuries, the slang names of the private parts of men and women have been considered obscene, as have the slang terms denoting sex acts such as the "F-word.". Interestingly, though, such words have not always been considered obscene. For example, in thirteenth-century London, there was a street frequented by prostitutes known as Gropecunt Lane, and the Old English predecessor of "fuck" was a neutral word that simply meant "to strike." On the other hand, in the eighteenth century, the word "arse" was considered to be so obscene that it was usually spelt "a**se." What's puzzling, too, is that it's hard to pinpoint what makes these words obscene. For example, there's nothing inherently obscene about the penis as an organ; and there's also nothing inherently obscene about the word "cock" after all, you can say the word "cock" in polite company, so long as you make it clear that you are referring to a barnyard fowl.

Language change
Tom Lehrer once wrote, "In my youth, there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'" The small change in language that Lehrer humorously notes is one that occurred over a few decades; over the course of centuries, small changes to the language accumulate, so that the English we now write and speak is vastly different from that spoken centuries ago. In Shakespeare's time, the verb "meddle" meant "to copulate," which is also what the verb "swink" could mean in Chaucer's time. Likewise, "onanism" and "cuckold" are no longer in common use, even though they once familiar: the former word denoted masturbation, and the latter a man whose wife had been unfaithful.

The language of beauty
Many words that signify physical beauty originally had sinister connotations. For example, "captivating" and "enthralling" suggest that the person's beauty will capture and enslave the beholder. "Pretty" originally meant "crafty," and "glamour" originally had associations with black magic, as did "enchanting," "bewitching," and "charming." Beauty is something that we desire, but also something we mistrust.

Food and animal metaphors
The language of love and sex is riddled with animal words, ranging from terms of endearment such as "turtle," "lamb," and "honey bunny," to collective nouns like "chick" and "fox," to kissing words (like "peck") that are drawn from the world of birds. Food words, too, have often been borrowed by lovers: "sweetie pie," "crumpet," and "sugar." Men are "beefcake" and women are "cheesecake"; the penis is sometimes called a "wiener," and breasts are often equated with fruit, while an attractive person is "eye candy." The language of love and sex is both poetic and earthy, visceral and imaginative.

Potential Interview Questions

1. Etymology, the study of word origins, seems kind of old-fashioned compared to a lot of recent literary theory. Why is etymology important?
2. Your first book, Cupboard Love, was about the origins of food words. This one's about sex. Was the shift from food to sex a natural one?
3. Is the way we talk about sex nowadays different from the way it was talked about centuries ago?
4. Are we more inventive than our ancestors when it comes to creating sexual slang?
5. You mention that the penis used to be called the "tarse," and breasts used to be called "paps." Why did those words become unfashionable?
6. Shakespeare is known for inventing a lot of words. Did he invent any words relating to love or sex?
7. Why are so many of our so-called "dirty words" related to sex?
8. A lot of the words that relate to sex tend to be either euphemistic on the one hand or obscene on the other. Why do they tend toward those extremes?
9. Your book covers a thousand years of English. What was the "sexiest" century, linguistically speaking?
10. How has technology changed the way that sexual slang spreads?
11. Are there any words in The Lover's Tongue that made you blush?
12. Why do so many words pertaining to love and sex come from the world of food or the world of animals?
13. What does the language of sex reveal about our attitudes towards sex?
14. Sex and violence are often linked in films and other media. Do you find the same link when it comes to the language of sex?
15. In one of your chapters you include a list of over thirteen hundred names for the penis. Why have Anglophones invented so many names for that organ?
16. Are there as many names for female body parts as there are for male body parts?
17. Do the words we use to describe love and sex simply reflect our attitudes, or do they shape and influence our attitudes?
18. One of your chapters is devoted to the language that's used in relation to gay sexuality. How do those words differ from the language used to describe straight sexuality?
19. You mention that "dink" is a Canadian word for the penis, and that "kanakas" is an Australian word for the testicles. Are there a lot of examples of that kind of regional sexual slang?
20. You mention that "vagina" comes from Latin, and "schlong" from Yiddish, and "qwim" from Welsh. Has English acquired sex words from all languages?
21. What are some of the strangest words you discovered in your research?
22. Some people have said that the "F-word" is an acronym standing for "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." Is that true?
23. Why are so many "four-letter words" considered taboo?
24. According to your book, the word "whore" is one of the oldest words in the English language. What are some of the other very old sex words, and what are some very recent ones?
25. In your book, you note that the word "testicle" is related to "testify," and "penis" is related to "pencil." Explain how those words are cousins.
26. Some of the strangest contemporary slang terms in your book are the ones about male masturbation - phrases like "spank Elvis" and "choke the chicken." What inspires those kinds of seemingly nonsensical idioms?
27. You suggest that a linguistic phenomenon called reduplication, the repetition of a syllable, characterizes many words pertaining to breasts - like "tatas," "chichis," "lulus," and "bonbons." Why is that?
28. Where does "Valentine's Day" get its name?
29. Most of your book is about the origins of words, but sometimes you comment on the origins of other cultural signs and symbols. You mention, for example, that the conventional "heart" symbol doesn't really correspond to the shape of a human heart. So how did that symbol arise?
30. What's behind the tradition of writing "X"s and "O"s at the end of a letter?
31. Do you think that your book covers almost all words pertaining to love and sex? Or are there a lot more out there?
32. You teach English in a university. How have your colleagues responded to your writing a book about sex words?

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