dogging

UPDATE: New entry written with the help of the Wordhunt!

WANTED: Verifiable evidence before 1993

The OED is preparing a new entry to cover this curious cultural phenomenon and recent inventive use of the ancient verb to dog. Meaning ‘the practice of watching people engage in sexual acts in a public space, typically a car park’, there is evidence of the term from 1993. Can you top that?

The origins of the phrase are uncertain. Could there be a link with the verb to dog, to pursue closely, from the implication that those watching dog the participants’ every move? Or could it be that those taking part would use walking the dog as an excuse for their sojourns.

kinky

UPDATE: Still unsolved - can you help?

WANTED: Verifiable evidence before 1959.

According to the OED, people have been kinky since 1889. But if you were kinky before 1959 you weren’t sexually adventurous, just a bit eccentric. Or were you? The earliest evidence in the OED for this sense is from Colin MacInnes’s book Absolute Beginners, but if you dabbled in a little slap and tickle before 1959 and are prepared to admit to it, you might be able to prove that the word is older.

marital aid

UPDATE: Earlier evidence found through the Wordhunt!

WANTED: Verifiable evidence before 1976

Is Burnham-on-Sea Britain’s naughtiest town? We can thank their local Gazette for the first citation of marital aid, a rather prim and proper sounding euphemism for sex toys, in 1976. Were adverts for these illicit items lurking in the back pages of your local paper long before that? Despite its nuptial connotations it seems unlikely that the word would have appeared on wedding lists of that era…

pole dance

UPDATE: Earlier evidence found through the Wordhunt!

WANTED: Verifiable evidence before 1992

Did you pole dance before 1992? Of course, people have danced around poles for centuries, but the modern sense of the word has little in common with the innocent days of the maypole. Defined in the OED as ‘an erotic dance or striptease performed while moving around a specially constructed pole’, the first evidence for this sense is from 1992. Can you do better?

wolf-whistle 1952

UPDATE: Earlier evidence found through the Wordhunt!

WANTED: Verifiable evidence before 1952; information on the word’s origin.

Did this distinctive sign of approval echo around the nation’s building sites before 1952? When did it become known as a wolf-whistle? The word wolf has been used to describe a sexually aggressive male since Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in 1847, so earlier evidence of the wolf-whistle must be out there.