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Bob and Tom put out an LP, I am informed, called "Camel Toe".
Most slang seems to be slight variations on existing slang, or it's fairly obvious. The term "wedgie" isn't particularly creative. There's not much mileage from "Well, they yanked upward on my underbritches and it wedged between my butt cheeks" to "wedgie" but camel toe seems to me a quantum leap. I mean, seeing a picture of a woman with a ventral wedgie and hearing it referred to as a camel toe, one can easily see that the term fits; that's why it caught on easily and spread so well. On the other hand, looking at woman in too-tight clothing, one doesn't normally think of camels.
The term didn't just happen. Someone coined that word, and is surely proud of it. I decided to find out who and when. Oxford Dictionaries Online says "1990s: from the supposed visual resemblance to the two toes of a camel's foot." They did better than others, though, who said that it involves the vagina. Actually, fellas, it's the mons, or perhaps even the labia, but the vagina is an internal organ.
I found that camel toe is popular, canel-toe and cameltoe is not, and that "camel lips" was another slang teerm, but I'm not sure if it referred to facial or genital lips. There was an ezxplosion of cites about 1992, and a couple from 1998, 1999. but no clue as to who coined the term.
And then I found a book published in the 1990s that referred to an article with the headline "Camel Toe is Killed by Train Thursday, February 24, 1933." The book wa about Cherokee women and how their basketweaving had changed over time, and lacking proper evidence, I assume that Camel Toe was the name of a Cherokee. I don't know that the woman's name was connected to the modern slang, but it sorta shoots my thesis out of the water, because if a Cherokee in rural Tennessee, in the 1930s had that name, my theory about a clever dude coming up with that slang falls flat. It could have been anyone.
As Emily Litella would say, "In that case, never mind!"
I first heard the term "camel toe" from my barber maybe 5 years ago. Had to look it up online. Guess I'm socially isolated. 🙂
So I was interested in your speculation about "camel lips" and delved into the citations from Ngrams. Only went 10 hits deep for each time range, but looks to me like "camel lips" historically meant "the lips of a camel." Only in the 90s did it start taking on sexual connotations. One example here.
Your citation also uses the phrase "ventral wedgie" which is a term I'd never run across but invented as a politer term for mixed company. I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it, and I suspect they had the same motivation.
A few years ago, people complained that Lululemon yoga pants were too transparent, and the manufacturer's spokesman apologized but didn't say Lululemon was going to recall their product or make any changes to avoid it happening again.
I recall seeing camel toe (on rare occasion) for decades, but I was unaware, until seeing your citation, that clothes were intentionally manufactured to do that. Between old attitudes that say women can't admit to enjoying sex, and new attitudes that say otherwise, there's definitely room in the marketplace for clothing that has "plausible deniability" when it comes to "indecent exposure."
This article explores the question of euphemisms in general.
I found the article looking for a term for the U.S. TV inconsistent practice of bleeping a word but leaving it in the CC or vice versa.
I see it usually when a UK TV program is broadcast here in the U.S.
The term I was looking for was "dropped words" or as Wikipedia has it: blanking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_music
https://mrphilosopher.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/on-self-censorship/
On Self-Censorship
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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