Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook a little while back, a headline from the business news:

Bottoming is a messy process (link)

The MarketWatch story, by Mark Hulbert, begins:

Bottoming is a process, not an event.

Some readers will see an entertaining ambiguity here.

The intended reading has the verb bottom in the following sense, from OED2:

intr. Of prices, trade, etc.: to reach the lowest level. Also with out. [cites from 1892 on]

But there’s a more recent verbing of the noun bottom, in a sexual sense (not in the OED yet), which I discussed at some length in a posting on “Power bottoms”: [of a gay man] ‘to take the receptive role in anal intercourse’. In that sense, bottoming can be messy, but with some care it need not be. (I’d also say that in that sense, bottoming is an activity, rather than an event or a process.)

The sexual use of the noun bottom seems to be relatively recent. Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2010) has it only from 1972 (in Bruce Rodgers’s Queens’ Vernacular, but of course Rodgers was reporting on earlier usage), and the cites there mingle uses for roles in sado-masochistic sex with roles in anal intercourse. Green’s dictionary doesn’t have the verbing, but examples are easy to find.

From the Gay Teen Forum site, a “first time” report:

We went straight back to my house and, after a bit of making out (my first time making out x_x), I sucked his cock and he came, he sucked my cock, though I didn’t cum, then he bottomed for me and I didn’t cum, then we 69’d for a little and I didn’t cum, and then I bottomed for him, and we both came. (link)

Plenty more like that.

This entry was posted on August 26, 2011 at 9:42 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Verbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.