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Etymology of 'To Pull'
Jan. 20th, 2013 09:28 amI've been kind of curious about the origin of 'pulling' in terms of how it is using in the slash stories I've been reading. Had never heard of the word used in the context of going to the club and having a one-off before. My first thought that it was an exclusively British term and/or a gay term that wasn't part of my American het etymology. Terms I'm used to as far as going to a bar are more along the lines of "to get lucky" or "to score."
So, I pulled out volume VII of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to look up the origin of the word pull. OED has over five pages on the literary references for 'pull'. I was surprised at first to find the first reference to pull in this context was a 20th Century one - James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) "O Yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief"
In the 1960s, pull was used in the context of multiple het sexual partners - Claude Brown in Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) "One of the group who had pulled a train on their sister" -- a train meaning multiple sexual partners. In 1965 in the Sunday Express a reporter included the quote "As a young man I could never pull any birds" (again het)
OED goes on to quote from Wilbur Smith's 1970 novel Gold Mine, "I felt like a peeping tom, watching someone, you know, pulling his pudding." Pudding, in the non-dessert sense sent me off in a completely different direction. I'd heard the term 'poundin' the pud' but hadn't really given it much thought.
So, obviously the pud is pudding and I was flipping the pages in the OED to get to the truth of the pudding. Which brought me to this lovely sentence from D'Urfey's 1719 work, Wit and Mirth, "I made a request to prepare again, That I might continue in Love with the strain of his Pudding."
I'm sure there are more references but these are the one's that amused me...
So, I pulled out volume VII of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to look up the origin of the word pull. OED has over five pages on the literary references for 'pull'. I was surprised at first to find the first reference to pull in this context was a 20th Century one - James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) "O Yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief"
In the 1960s, pull was used in the context of multiple het sexual partners - Claude Brown in Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) "One of the group who had pulled a train on their sister" -- a train meaning multiple sexual partners. In 1965 in the Sunday Express a reporter included the quote "As a young man I could never pull any birds" (again het)
OED goes on to quote from Wilbur Smith's 1970 novel Gold Mine, "I felt like a peeping tom, watching someone, you know, pulling his pudding." Pudding, in the non-dessert sense sent me off in a completely different direction. I'd heard the term 'poundin' the pud' but hadn't really given it much thought.
So, obviously the pud is pudding and I was flipping the pages in the OED to get to the truth of the pudding. Which brought me to this lovely sentence from D'Urfey's 1719 work, Wit and Mirth, "I made a request to prepare again, That I might continue in Love with the strain of his Pudding."
I'm sure there are more references but these are the one's that amused me...
