Among my Christmas gifts last year was a daily calendar titled Forgotten English, which defines words that have fallen out of common usage and relates amusing anecdotes about linguistics and/or literature. The entry for January 13 made me laugh out loud, and I thought I’d share it here:Hochle—to tumble lewdly with women in open day
On this day in 1668, diarist Samuel Pepys jotted what may be the earliest English reference to pornography, saying, “Stopped at Martin’s my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have for my wife to translate, called L’escholle des filles [The School of Girls, 1655]. But when I come to look at it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw, rather worse than Putana errante, so that I was ashamed of reading in it.” But on February 8 he returned to Martin’s “and there staid an hour and bought the idle, rogueish book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it.” The next morning, Pepys rationalized his purchase as “a mighty lewd book, but not yet amiss for a sober man once to read over the inform himself of
the villany of the world.” That evening, after a “mighty good store of wine,” he carried out his plan: “I to my chamber, where I did read through L’escholle des filles . . . and after I had done it I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame.”
Human nature never changes, does it?
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