Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

We know that men around the world get the same sort of hard-ons that English-speakers do. But men around the world also use different kinds of grammar to talk about their hard dicks.

When we look at the list of English slang terms for "erection" it's curious that essentially all of them are also nouns. So for example, a guy might be said to have a boner, chubby, fatty, hard-on, stiffy, or woody.

We also talk usually about erections using the verbs have, get, and give. We have a hard-on or get a boner. Or perhaps something gives us an erection. But have, get, and give are very general "vanilla" verbs that can be used with almost any object. What is odd is that we don't have in English any specific verb that means "get an erection."

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nstead our normal language pattern makes the guy in question the subject of a sentence and his erection the object of the sentence. In "Billy has a boner," Billy is the subject and boner the object. (It's marginally possible to say Billy's dick stiffened, but this sounds like bad porn-- unnatural and unusual.)

Because this is such a common way of talking, it may not seem unusual. But since erection is really a process, why doesn't English describe it with a verb? Why don't we say something like "I bonered" or "I hardened"?

We know erections occur when blood flows into the penis. But when blood flows to the face, we call this blushing. And blush is a verb; not a noun. We don't say "I had a blush" or "That picture gave me a blush."

What's the difference between blushing and having an erection? Here it turns out that there's something interesting going on in English. If we look at all the things that our bodies do and all the states they can be in, about half involve verbs like blush. So we also have sweat, shiver, smile, laugh, cry, cough, shit, piss, tremble, pout, frown.

Another large group of body-states are expressed with nouns plus a vanilla verb like have, get, or give. States in this group include headache, fever, rash, chills, cold, diarrhea, vertigo, arthritis, and cancer.

What surprised Blanche about comparing these two lists is that all the body states expressed with nouns are actually illnesses or disorders of the body. The body-states expressed with verbs are neutral-- some are just normal actions of the body and only a few (cough) refer to illness. The contrasts are striking. Shivering is a normal reaction to cold, but to have a tremor / chills / shakes refers to some illness. Similarly, trembling is a normal reaction to fear, but to have a tremor suggests an illness. Apparently, when something is normal it's a verb, but when it's an illness or an abnormal state of the body, we talk of it using a noun.

Strange as it seems, English talks about erections as if they were an illness, using the pattern we find for cancer or diarrhea! So we have a rash / an erection / a head-ache. I doubt that many English speakers think that an erection is like a rash, but some thought pattern like this must have been present in the English of earlier generations. We find a similar pattern phenomenon in some other Germanic languages. In German, for you say Ich habe einen Steifen, which is exactly like I have a stiffy in English.

Comparing English to Romance languages, we find many of them do invoke verbs to talk about erection. In French, there is a very useful verb bander-- simply, "to get an erection." Je bande means "I get an erection." Similarly in Italian, there is a verb rizzarsi-- again, "to get an erection," as in a phrase like Mi si e rizzato il cazzo, which is literally something like "The dick got hard on me."

There are some stereotypes about national character in Europe which might be related to these differences. So according to popular lore, northern countries such as England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway are gloomy and strict about sex, while more southern countries, the likes of Italy and France, are light-hearted and less repressive. This might have been truer in previous generations, but it's hard to visit modern Amsterdam or Berlin and come away believing this.

Yet it may be that the sexual repression of past centuries does leave a mark in a language's grammar. Though we're not aware of it now, English speakers long ago seem to have regarded erections as an illness, using the same kind of language to talk about boners, headaches, and diarrhea. Fortunately, grammar is not destiny and readers of The Guide need not seek medical attention for the condition that may arise from reading this issue.