What punctuation do you use for this word? (Patreon)

While I was working on the Quickshot review a couple months ago I hosted a poll on Twitter, asking how one punctuates this word:

1) Deep Throating, 2) Deep-Throating, or 3) Deepthroating.

Brian Forté emailed me an absolutely fascinating, thorough response that he has graciously permitted me to share with you all as well, all these months later (I'M REALLY BEHIND ON ALL MY EMAIL, OK). I hope you enjoy as much as I did :)

(PS: The attached image is, obviously, a reference picture I took to help me draw that pose for next week's comic, a review of the Amorina!)

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You asked on [Twitter][1]:

> This is for work and Google isn’t helping. What punctuation do you

> use for this word?

> 32% Deep Throating

> 27% Deep-Throating

> 41% Deepthroating

[1]: https://twitter.com/ErikaMoen/status/734939195727220737

Ah, the joys of compound word formation (and the joys of creative procrastination when I have deadlines).

The term, meaning fellatio in which the receptive actor takes their partner’s entire erect penis into their mouth, appears to originate with the 1972 film, *Deep Throat*. (In Latin, BTW, ‘fellatio’ denotes oral stimulation of the penis where the stimulator is in control. This includes what we call ‘deepthroating’. The Romans distinguished this activity from ‘irrumatio’ which we might translate as ‘face fucking’ except the Romans perceived the act as non-consensual almost by definition. That said, the Latin ‘os impurum’ or ‘filthy mouth’ was an insulting Roman term for the fellating partner. The Romans, it seems, had broad cultural issues with oral sex.)

It’s not the only informal term for an oral sex act that is relatively recent. ‘Give head’ appears in the 1940s. ‘Blow job’ dates to the early 1930s. And even ‘cocksucker’ only goes back to the 1880s. General words used as double-entendres — eg suck, eat, nosh, naschen and nibble — go back a lot further. There’s Richard Barnfield’s 1594 poem ‘The Tears of an Affectionate Shepheard Sicke for Love’, for example:

O would to God (so I might have my fee)
My lips were honey, and thy mouth a Bee
Then shouldst thou sucke my sweete and my faire flower
That is now ripe, and full of honey-berries.
Then would I leade thee to my pleasant Bower
Fild full of Grapes, of Mulberries, and Cherries;
Then shouldst thou be my Waspe, or else my Bee,
I would, thy hive, and thou my honey bee.
Getting back on track, ‘blowjob’ is instructive here.

When it first appeared, it was sex worker cant. A ‘blow job’ was a client who was willing to be ‘blown off’, ie fellated to orgasm. There is a probable connection to the Victorian English phrase ‘a below job’ but, since this is mostly oral — excuse the pun — tradition, the linkage is not as certain as it might first appear, especially since ‘blow job’ is a US English creation. Wherever it came from, ‘blow job’ was very definitely a two-word noun when it first appeared. And it remained two words all the way through to the 1960s, when it developed a hyphen, becoming ‘blow-job’, especially in some of the ‘newly liberated’ literature of the time. Philip Roth kept it as two words in *Portnoy’s Complaint* but it was hyphenated in Mario Puzo’s *The Godfather*. By the beginning of the 1980s, even the hyphen was mostly gone.

‘Blowjob’ was dominant and it is now considered the normative spelling. This follows the fashion of most words formed by compounding (words created from two or more root morphemes).

First, it’s a compound two (or, occasionally, more) -word noun or verb phrase.

Then it’s a hyphenated word.

Finally, it’s a single word.

US English is, in general, faster to ditch the hyphen than the various Commonwealth Englishes, with Indian English, in particular, very conservative on this front.

If your numbers above from Google are representative of current en-US usage (Google still biases towards en-US when it crawls the web), it suggests ‘deepthroat’ is well on the way to becoming a single compound word.

It’s not there yet, however, and whichever spelling you choose, you can be confident that someone will take umbrage at your choice. :-(

Finally, and FWIW, since this is mostly me working from memory and very quick Google searches, ‘Deep Throat’ — capitalised and written as two words — appears to have some traction as a proper noun signifying a secret informant. It’s from Mark Felt, who used the alias when he was acting as the source for Woodward and Bernstein in their stories concerning the Watergate scandal of the early-1970s. Felt took the alias from the infamous film, BTW.

Hope this is at least diverting, if not helpful.

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Thank you for letting me share this with everyone, Brian! Who knew the history of deepthroating was so... deep? ;D