A Sociological Eye

  I teach a course in sociology of sexuality, and the etymologies of sexual phenomena are things I collect by habit. Let me share one with you!  In Mediaeval Latin, a "clapus" or "claperius" was a pile of stones. What might you do with a pile of stones in the Middle Ages? Well, if you put a few such piles in a stream, and then put stone slabs or wooden planks going from one pile to the other, you could construct what was called in English a "clapper bridge," like the one pictured here. Very picturesque! If on the other hand you piled the stones loosely on the ground with plenty of spaces amidst them, you could make a place to house rabbits for food. In French, this was a "clapier." The association of rabbits with sexual frequency and enthusiasm led the term clapier to come to be used as a euphemism for a brothel. The Normans brought these usages to English shores, where they became, just as in the bridges, a "clapper," referring either ...

This is a chart showing you the number of babies given a certain name over time in the USA—the name my father was in fact given. His name was Dick. Ok, that was the name he always used, but his actual given name was Richard. That Dick is a nickname for Richard seems peculiar to many Americans today, but here’s how that emerged: a classic Medieval nickname for Richard was Rick (as it remains today!). Rick was a shortened version of the name, which at the time was pronounced rather like “Rick-hart.” And in Medieval England, new nicknames were coined via rhyming—hence Rick became Dick.  In the 1930s when my father was born, Richard was the fifth most popular name for children designated male at birth. But plenty of parents skipped the formality of naming their kid Richard before calling him Dick. They just named their children what they intended to call them. And you can see in the graph that Dick (as a given name) peaked in popularity in 1934. You can see similar patterns with other ...