Today’s new entry:
¶ I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick and variants, (used to describe a sexually unappealing woman).
I made an effort to include more phrases in this edition. In many cases I promoted phrases that were already included in catch-all entries into proper entries in their own right, but I also added a number of common phrases that hadn’t been treated at all. This is one such example, and a well-attested one at that; even at its first appearance in the late 1960s, it was described as a “folk phrase”, with the implication that it was already common then. Quotes for this entry come from Elmore Leonard and Jackie Collins, among others.
This is a sample definition of one of the many (over 120) new entries from the third edition of The F-Word. In the time leading up to publication, I will be featuring one such entry a day. In the book itself, these definitions will be supplemented with a number of quotations showing the use of the word or phrase (which is the whole point of a historical dictionary of this sort). In other words, this is only a teaser!
What’s the prosody here? Presumably:
I wouldn’t fuck her with YOUR dick.
i.e. never mind fucking her with my own dick, she’[s so unattractive that I wouldn’t even fuck her with someone else’s?
I ask because I was confused by this for quite a few minutes. I’ve never heard the phrase and instinctively read it with unstressed ‘your’, giving it a generic meaning: ‘(If I were you) I wouldn’t fuck her with my dick (but I might with something else).’ But that didn’t make any sense, and still less if this is your favourite entry, Jesse, as you say on Facebook. So I was confused until I put an emphasis on ‘your’ to imply a contrast between the speaker’s own and the interlocutor’s. But is that the right reading?
Yes, it is. Indeed, many of the quotes put “your” in italics. It’s not standard practice to italicize individual words in lemmas, but the quotations—visible in the book itself, but not in this excerpt—would make the usage more clear.
Damien’s reading–in which the emphasis is on the last word– is way funny. It conjures up the image of a very matter-of-fact sex advice column, in the style of some kind of home improvement guru advising a clueless guy who’s trying to remove a rusted-on bolt with a pair of channel lock pliers.
“Now, you’ve definitely got a problem there, and as I’ve said before, the key is finding the right tool for the job. Now I definitely wouldn’t fuck her with your *dick.* You might want to check around your toolbox….”
Pleased to be of service!