Commenter John yesterday on my “whoopee cushion” posting:
So the point of intersection of “making whoopie” and “razzberry” is quiff?
Well, it turns out that in addition to quiff referring to a hair style (first discussed in this blog here), it has plenty of other senses. What I said in that first quiff posting was:
(Quiff is a word that sounds like it ought to be at least naughty, if not actually coarse slang — “his quiff in her quim”, something like that — and indeed a huge variety of slang senses have been reported. Apparently, it’s just one of those dirty-sounding words that can get pressed into service for any old off-color meaning. Including as an onomatopoetic verb meaning ‘fart’.)
Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists quite a variety of meanings, and Urban Dictionary adds more.
From Green, on the noun quiff in anatomical or sexual senses:
1 the vagina [cites from c.1709 through 2001]
2 women, esp. sexually available ones [cites from c.1930 through 2002] [a common metonymic shift from sense 1]
3 (US) a homosexual [cites from 1950 through 1980] [another common shift, metaphorical in character, from ‘woman’ to ‘homosexual man’]
And it has the verb quiff ‘to have sexual intercourse’ (cites from 1674 though 1811 — so now obsolete).
(Compare quim, with the senses ‘the vagina’; ‘a woman; women collectively viewed in a sexual context’; (US gay) ‘the anus’; (US gay/prison) ‘a heterosexual inmate, subject to homosexual rape’; ‘a general derog. term of abuse’ — this last a common sense-development from ‘woman’ or ‘homosexual male’.)
Urban Dictionary has the sense that my commenter John was presumably alluding to, combining vaginal sex (making whoopee / whoopie) and farting (the razzberry); in one formulation:
Air admitting from the vagina mixed with bodily fluid making a farting sound.. otherwise known as the pussy fart.
Other entries have the hairstyle, plus ‘fart’, ‘vagina’, ‘slut, prostitute’, ‘homosexual man’, and a generic derogatory.
June 7, 2013 at 3:34 pm |
From John Dorrance on Facebook:
Other sources have the variant spelling as well.
June 8, 2013 at 10:04 am |
[…] to who uses them in what contexts for what purposes. (See my comments on the many uses of quiff here.) In addition, a huge number of very frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives have slang uses as well […]