Adult Entertainment

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bob from Asheville, North Carolina.

Hello, Bob. Asheville.

Hey. Yeah. And I have a question about a word.

And I think it’s kind of a contextual thing I’ve been wondering about for a while.

Okay.

I think a lot of us have been in a situation where we’ve felt kind of awkward with kids in the car and you’ve driven by and they say, “Daddy, what’s an adult bookstore? What’s an adult movie theater?”

And, you know, you kind of talk around it or say, “Oh, that’s something you’ll see when you’re older,” or whatever.

But, you know, everybody basically in that context, you know, you have no doubt what that is.

But then I’m thinking I saw an advertisement, and they couldn’t keep from laughing because they were advertising adult daycare center, you know, a place to take your aging parents.

Oh, no.

They couldn’t take care of themselves.

And we were making horrible, you know, really bad jokes about, you know, branding in a red corset and stuff like that.

Got us to thinking apparently the word adult means different things in different contexts.

Yeah, an adult daycare center could be really fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re never too old. Yeah, of course.

Nice. And then we were thinking you go in a library and you know like they have a section called children’s books but you don’t think of the rest of the library as the adult section.

No, no, not unless there’s a beaded room somewhere. Why a beaded doorway?

The secret chamber.

So anyhow, really what I was wondering is when did it come to be that the word adult is used as a euphemism for pornography, so everybody kind of understands what it is?

Adult really started to take on the connotation of having to do with the more purient and sexual side of being adult, the things that adults do together when they’re alone.

And about the time that America started mainstreaming, titillating content, adult had long been used, even in the early days of the movie-making business, to refer to films that had blood and violence and adult situations that weren’t sexual.

And they used it very specifically to mean this content is not appropriate for a child.

And they weren’t talking about anything sexual at all.

And so, of course, by the time we started mainstreaming sexual content in our movies and our books and our magazines and so forth, the term was already there and ready to be used to refer to the sexual nature of something as well.

So are we talking late 50s, early 60s?

That’s right. Yeah. In the 1950s, 40s and 50s is when we start to see adult take on this kind of subsense to mean of a sexual nature, of a prurient nature.

When I was a kid, there were theaters, and they used to call them art houses, and I thought maybe that was to get around the law like the Supreme Court because it had artistic merit.

Well, it could have been.

I’m certainly that was definitely one of the epistemisms, as was French film.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and blue movies, too.

I mean, when I was little, I pictured blue movies.

I mean, is that like Avatar?

What?

The Smurfs.

Really?

The Smurfs.

Oh, the Smurfs.

But in any case, yeah, there’s plenty of room because of those dual meanings for lots of jokes and laughs about this.

I think it’s almost always context sensitive.

And if you want to misunderstand for the sake of the joke, then go right ahead.

But I think it’s usually pretty easy from context to tell.

All right.

I love the show.

And thank you for answering that.

Bob, thank you for calling from Nashville.

Thanks, Bob.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

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