| Sexual slang and euphemism in "Her Heart Was in Her Work" (reply to thtrgoer) | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:05 pm EST 12/02/24 | |
| In reply to: Alan those lyrics are not quite as "out there" & risque as I'd hoped from yr descriptions! Nm - thtrgoer 04:43 pm EST 11/27/24 | |
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| Hey, thtrgoer. I wrote in an earlier post, “Re the one or two cut songs for Verdon: I mentioned that one, recorded on a Bagley (but there are additional verses as well as some slightly different lines in the complete lyrics book), was titled ‘Her Heart Was in Her Work,’ and it has some of the rawest double-entendres I’ve ever heard in any song by anyone. It’s bawdy even by Porter standards. Supposedly, Conried objected to the song. That is what the notes to the Bagley say.” I should say now that if anyone is offended by a vulgar term for the female genitalia, you may not want to read any further. Not that i fully spell out the word below. I’m pretty sure the post would be rejected if I did. thtrgoer, we may have just have different points of view as to what constitutes raw double-entendres and bawdiness even by Porter’s standards, but at the risk of explaining some stuff that may be obvious (but some of which also may not be), I will start by saying that there are sexual double-entendres in several verses and I’m not sure if some of them are obvious today Some of them are now perhaps obscure. A few may have been obscure even when Porter wrote the song. Sexual slang changes, some terms become outdated, and new ones are always coming along. First, I will tell the story that Ben Bagley told in his notes for the Cole Porter Vol. III recording he produced, where the song was recorded (including different verses than are on Porter's recording) by Lynn Redgrave and Arthur Siegel. According to Bagley, Gwen Verdon told Bagley that when Porter sang the song for Hans Conried and her, Conried asked, "Is this about a c__t?" Porter said yes, and Conried refused to sing it. You might think Porter would say, "We'll find an actor who will sing it. Thank you very much, Mr. Conried." But he didn't. Of course, Bagley was not the most reliable of sources, but if Gwen Verdon really did tell him that, I believe it. I don’t know if you were seeing the song as being about . . . well . . . that term. In preparing this post, I consulted several books on sexual slang (thanks to the controversial Internet Archive) just to be sure that I was getting these explanations and definitions right. In a couple of cases, words and phrases for which I looked were not listed in any of the several books I consulted so while most of the definitions below either come directly from one or more books on sexual slang and euphemisms (or slang more generally), a few came either from me or from internet searches. To return to the story above, it's clear that every time the phrase "Her heart was in her work" comes up and the word work is not sung, but instead we hear a chord and the singers are supposed to make a gesture, that's what they're meant to be indicating. And so even when they sing all the words, it really means “Her heart was in her c__t.” I will now go through the song in the order that the verses are printed in the complete lyrics book, defining phrases that are either definitely or I think probably (in some cases just possibly) sexual double-entendres: Pop — One book gave me this: “to coit a woman. Cf: pop it in.” Another book gave me this: “1. Intercourse 2. Orgasm” Rocks — One book gave me this for the singular: “rock: to coit a woman. From the movements of coition.” Another book gave me this as the second definition:.”Hard penis.” For the plural, one book gave me this: “The testicles,” I will say that I’m not sure Porter intended this one as a double-entendre. But I’m also not sure he didn’t. “Opera box” — I was surprised to find only a couple of books that defined box. It was surprising to me because this is, or at least used to be, so common. In any case, it’s vagina. One book described it as a male-to-male term for a woman’s vagina, which seems a bit odd given the famous Sophie Tucker joke that Bette Midler used to tell in the Sophie Tucker portion of her act. (I suppose it’s possible that it’s not an authentic Sophie Tucker story but one created by Midler or her writers.) Now that I’ve defined box, in case you weren’t familiar with this meaning for the word, I will add that opera here means open. Porter used “box” with the same meaning in “They Couldn’t Compare to You,” except in that song the word isn’t actually sung, adding to the sense that it’s too naughty to be sung. The word is there in the complete lyrics book, but on both the OBCR and the Encores! recording, the female chorus comes in with the refrain when the word is about to sung. It’s clear that box is the word that would be sung if it it weren’t too dirty. I’m linking the song from the OBCR, just in case you don’t know it. It’s very clear that the chorus comes in as a joke: “Uh-oh, we can’t let that word be sung in this context.” “Now she lives on caviar” — Nothing about caviar in any of the books, but caviar is fish. And Porter once wrote a song titled “Fish,” about a fishermaid who couldn’t get any fish to bite, so she gave up that trade for a different one (one in which she hawked fish to passersby). Did Porter intend caviar here to be understood that way, at least by some? Maybe not, but it seems possible to me. Dying and Dying Swan — Dying may be a reference to le petit mort. For Dying Swan, I found this via google (just a google note on the search page, with no source), which I am guessing is what Porter had in mind: “In a sexual context, a ‘dying swan’ is often interpreted as a metaphor for a final, passionate moment of sexual climax, signifying the peak of arousal and pleasure before a sort of ‘release’ or ‘end’ to the act, drawing on the idea of a swan's graceful beauty and the tragic, fleeting nature of its ‘swan song’ before death; it emphasizes the intensity and ephemeral quality of the experience.” I also found confirmation of dying swan as a term for orgasm in a New Yorker piece by the magazine’s music critic, Alex Ross, from his A Critic at Large column. The column was about Don Carlo Gesualdo: “The madrigal, a short secular piece for a small group of voices, became the favorite vehicle of musical Mannerism. The scholar Susan McClary, in her 2004 book ‘Modal Subjectivities,’ singles out as a turning point ‘Il bianco e dolce cigno,’ a 1539 madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt, a Franco-Flemish composer who prospered in Italy. The text presents a typical Renaissance double-entendre, comparing the cry of a dying swan to the 'joy and desire' of sexual oblivion. At the climax, the voices split into an ecstatic series of wavelike lines—’the first graphic simulation in music of orgasm,’ McClary proposes.” “Though his salary is a small one” — I don’t think I have to explain this. I’m not sure Porter intended that double meaning. A friend I spoke with who knows the song thinks I'm reading too much into it. Maybe. “open carriage” — One of the books I consulted, The slang of venery and its analogues, has “Open C: The female pudendum.” Another book, Slang and euphemism: a dictionary of oaths, curses, insults, sexual slang and metaphor, racial slurs, drug talk, homosexual lingo, and related matters, has “Open C. the female genitalia. The ‘C’ is for ‘c__t.’” “Hip, hip, hurrah!” — I think this is pretty self-explanatory coming right after “open carriage,” especially in context of “When they see your open carriage, they will yell, ‘Hip, hip hurrah!’” and then followed by “Her heart was in her [gesture].” As the First Gentleman says to the aged bawd, Mistress Overdone, in Measure for Measure: “How now, which of your hips has the most profound sciatica?” “Now that she is cleaning him” — This could be taken as cleaning him out of money, but I see another meaning. The friend whom I consulted thinks I am reading something into it that Porter probably didn’t intend. “Leaping Lulu” - For leap, both Slang and euphemism and The slang of venery and its analogues, have “to copulate.” “took a toss” — Slang and euphemism has “toss in the hay: an act of copulation.” Smut: American sex slang has “Toss in the hay: f__k.” Did Porter intend this? In context, it may seem not, and yet I’m not so sure. “riding bareback on her boss” — I probably don’t need to give a definition, but just in case, Slang and euphemism has “bareback: pertaining to an act of copulation performed without a condom,” and several of the other books I consulted (probably needless to say) had the same definition, if not always expressed in exactly the same words. Organ – Again, I probably don’t need to give a definition, but to be on the safe side, Smut: American sex slang has “Genitalia,” while The slang of venery has “The penis.” “waits on her” — ’nuff said, I think. “till the day of your release” — Even though none of the books I looked at had release as slang for orgasm, the Our Bodies Ourselves Today website has this on the page with the subject “All About Orgasms”: “Orgasm is the pleasurable release of all that sexual tension built up during arousal and engorgement of clitoris, vagina, and vulva.” I think release as a euphemism for orgasm is pretty common. |
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