|
|
 |
 |
|
Wank
Not found in polite dictionaries, this word for masturbation has extended its reach into wanker, one who practices what used to be dramatically called self-defilement. A wanker, broadly used, is a person of acute spiritual inanition, concerned only with lazy private gratification. Actually, wanker has been around since the late nineteenth century, always the word for jerk-off, and owing something to a dialect word, wank, a violent blow (to one's meat, et cetera). Perhaps akin to wankle, meaning unsteady (Old English wancol). The wan component recalls schoolboy myths about masturbation, principally that it made you deathly pale and hollowed out your spine. Wise boys kept their yield in huge stone jars beneath their beds at least until manhood, when such vessels might be passed on to weaklings who needed them to boast about: hence a freemasonry of sperm (or spunk).
Note Anthony Burgess's comment in One Man's Chorus (1998): "When I was told, untruthfully, that I was still 'wanking,' I assumed that this meant masturbating, but it has developed the meaning of lazing, refusing to work."
|
©1999
Paul West and Nerve.com
|
|
|
