Watch Your Language

By GEORGE WEAVER

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Use of the words perversion, fellatio, and cunnilingus in your various issues prompts the following remarks. It is high time that English and American writers abandoned the Greek and Latin vocabulary of the nineteenth-century Krafft-Ebing, and showed a little consideratio for their readers by not referring to fellatio as a sexual aberratio. Be it known that the English verb is fellate, and the noun is fellation (cf. Kinsey. Male Report. p. 793). This is from the viewpoint of the oral partner; the same act. from the viewpoint of the penile partner, is called irrumation. There is no such act as cunnilingus. for cunnilingus was the Latin word for what we call. in English. a cunnilinctor. The act in question is called cunnilinctus (cf. Ellis. Psychology of Sex, p. 367; also Roger-Maxe de la Glannege. Oragenitalism).

Let us abandon ancient Greek and Latin words like paiderastia and paedicatio, and let us avoid the common mistake of confusing pederasty (the erotic use of a boy by an adult male. in any way; from the Greek word for boy with pedication (rectal coitus, either homosexual or heterosexual; from the Latin word for rump or anus). If we are going to discuss sexual acts, let us learn the proper English words. The penile partner in pedication is called a pedicator: the receptive partner. a pedicant. No matter what the Law may say (and it has no right to say anything on the subject). the sexologist regards sodomy as a synonym for homosexual pedication.

Finally, let us remember what Havelock Ellis says, in his Psychology of Sex, about the word perversion, which, though "still used by those whose ideas are rooted in traditions of the past which they cannot outgrow," is "completely antiquated and mischievous, and should be avoided." The modern word for the non-reproductive sexual acts is deviation. (Incidentally. one of the strangest of these sexual deviations, which Freud describes as the contact of the mucous membranes constituting the entrance to the digestive tracts of two persons, may be seen openly portrayed in almost every American motion picture! Curiously enough, it does not seem to be illegal.)

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