Dear Faldage: Pubic wigs are not comical. Since you know that is the dictionary meaning of "merkin", I think it is wretchedly bad taste and a serious abuse of AWADtalk to use it here. And you are a pathetic hypocrite
to criticise my occasional ribaldry.
MY FELLOW MERKINS
An Internet bad joke
The word merkin is one of the perpetual bad puns of the Internet. I first
came across it in the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett (a group devoted
to the works of the British fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, he of the
Discworld fantasies) and it puzzled me. From context, it seemed to be
used as a synonym for inhabitant of the United States of America but it
only slowly dawned on me that those who used it were guying a supposed
half-swallowed pronunciation of "American" by some Americans,
particularly the late Lyndon Johnson.
Then I looked it up and the full force of the pun hit me. The word actually
has a number of senses, all of them sexually-related and, therefore, highly
risible to persons of a certain cast of mind. One of the current standard
ones is pubic wig (such wigs are used, apparently, in the theatrical and film
worlds as modesty devices in nude scenes). It can also be a contrivance
used by male cross-dressers to imitate the female genitals. Another sense
which is even lower slang and which came into the language last century is,
as Eric Partridge delicately puts it in A Dictionary of Historical Slang,
"an artificial vagina for lonely men".
The OED says that its first use in English, in the sixteenth century, was as a
term for the female genitals, but then its sense transferred to the pubic hair,
and from there to artificial pubic hair and then much later to an artificial
vagina. Such is the shifting and inconsistent nature of vocabulary, at least
when the word concerns intimate matters not often spoken of in public nor
written down.
Various people on the alt.usage.english newsgroup (Mark Israel, Paul
Andresen, Mark Brader) have recently been discussing Stanley Kubrick's
1964 film Dr Strangelove, which named the character of the President,
one of the parts played by Peter Sellers, as "Merkin Muffley". This gets
two risqué usages past the censor at once, since "muff" is another slang
term for the female genitals (as in muff-diving for cunnilingus). This name
was presumably the work of Kubrick or his scriptwriters, since the book
on which the film was based (Red Alert by Peter George, pseudonym of
the late Peter Bryant), does not name the presidential character.
No doubt you will understand now why the use of Merkin in Usenet
posts is usually restricted to non-Americans ...
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Page created 2 January 1996; last updated 26 Februar
