A rose by any other name - sexy escorts do their research!

Do you have a particular word or phrase for sex? The reason I ask is that when I mentioned to the girls that I was going on a date with a guy I had met in a gastro pub in Hertford one of them sniggered “oh, more hanky panky for you then”. I had to laugh because the phrase sounds so silly and in fact when mentioning it out of context it sounds even more absurd. I was intrigued as to the etymology of the phrase as individually the words just didn’t seem to equate to sex. First of all let’s consider “hanky” which of course sounds like the abbreviation for handkerchief or a tissue. “Panky” is even more obscure and doesn’t remind me of anything at all. None of the busty escorts at Hertfordshire visiting escort services, not even blonde escort Kim who had a degree in English language had a clue or could even guess at the original meaning so I went online doing what everybody does these days and googled it!

Well, ‘hanky panky’ first appeared in Punch magazine in eighteen forty one and actually does not have an origin in Greek, Latin, French or any of the other languages that formed the basis for the English that we speak today. It’s just a made up phrase and originally meant to get up to no good and engage in counterfeit behaviour or trickery. You can see why it then became associated with sex, which of course as a pastime has a chequered history in our formerly puritanical society.

This got the Hertford escorts going and soon there followed a barrage of questions about other phrases such as ‘rumpy pumpy’, ‘leg over’ and more. The first of these sounds like it is from the days of jolly old England but in fact is quite a recent construction and does not appear in any literature before the late nineteen sixties. It was first coined in a radio show called ‘Round the Horne’ in nineteen sixty seven when comedian Kenneth Williams performed an old Scottish folk song but in the style of the two Ronnies all sorts of double entendres and naughty sounding nonsense was added. Following that it appeared in print for the first time in nineteen sixty eight in the Scottish national dictionary.

Many of the hot escorts had heard or used the phrase ‘getting your leg over’ and it’s easy to discern why as its highly visual and descriptive. Even google couldn’t come up with an answer as to where it comes from or was first used. I suppose that it is again quite a literal expression and self explanatory.

I told the sexy escorts that I would do some research and explain some more soon - after I have done a little bit of practical work to go with the theory! Nudge, nudge...