Back on the 19th, in a collecion of miscellany, I reported (in item 4) on the porn film title Pacific Rim Job: an overlap of Pacific Rim and rim job ‘anilingus / analingus’. Which made me reflect on sexual X job expressions, a small family of compounds referring to sexual acts, of which three are especially frequent: blow job and rim job (of the form V + job) and hand job (of the form N + job). So to other snowclonelet composites examined on this blog and Language Log (among them, X fag, X porn, X queen, X rage, X virgin, X whore, X drag, X magnet, X Nazi, X slut, X porn, X police), we can now add X job.
Some exclusions. Not every compound of the form X job is an instance of this snowclonelet; only ones with job ‘sexual act’ as their head are. So compounds referring to types of plastic surgery (boob job, nose job, butt job) are irrelevant, as are those referring to automotive work (lube job, grease job).
(These compounds are variously punctuated — written separated, hyphenated, or solid — and I’ll preserve the punctuation of my sources, but otherwise will cite them, as above, in separated spellings.)
History of the big three. The compounds are not venerable; they go back only to the middle of the 20th century. It looks like hand job was coined first, but not by much. OED3 (June 2013) has its first cite from 1939:
P. Di Donato Christ in Concrete ii. vii. 99 If you death-murdered cocks desire not to work then say so and go into the cellar and do the hand-job!
There are four cites in all; one cite is solid, three hyphenated.
Then blow job, which OED2 has first in 1961:
A. Hecht in Hudson Rev. XIV. 371 59 And you can get a blow-job Where other men have pissed.
(This cite is hyphenated; the others are written separated.)
(OED2 has blow ‘fellate’ first in 1933.)
But OED2 hasn’t been revised for a long time. And Green’s Dictionary of Slang has cites for blow job ‘fellatio’ in the 1940s, not long after the first cite for hand job.
Now, rim job is genuinely more recent. OED3 (June 2010) has its first cite in 1969:
S. Cannon Groove, bang & jive Around 8 Thrills shot from one end of Annette’s body to the other, as his tongue ran circles around her behind, giving her a rim job.
(OED3 has rim ‘to stimulate the anus of (a person) with the tongue or mouth, as a sexual act’ first in 1941.)
Semantics of the big three. For hand job, OED3 has:
slang (orig. U.S.) an act of (usually male) masturbation, esp. performed by one person on another
The core meaning is of one man masturbating another, but the compound can also be used for someone masturbating themselves or for someone masturbating a woman; speakers differ as to which of the uses are natural for them.
For blow job, OED2 also has a broader meaning than I would have expected:
slang (orig. U.S.) (the act of performing) cunnilingus or fellatio
Green’s Dictionary says that the ‘cunnilingus’ sense is specifically U.S. black and gives only one cite, from 1997. But there may well be some speakers who have extended the compound to oral sex in general.
Finally, rim job in OED3:
coarse slang (orig. U.S.) an act of stimulating another person’s anus sexually with the tongue
More jobs. Hand job and blow job are the conventional X job compounds for the referents, but people have explored other possibilities: for hand job, jack job and mano job are both attested; and for blow job, suck job and mouth job.
Then there’s clit job as a slang variant of cunnilingus.
And my favorite, the hum job, a blow job accompanied by humming to further stimulate the recipient.
Note that all these terms except clit job take the point of view of the “active” participant in these sex acts: the person who supplies the hand and does the jacking in a hand job; the person who supplies the mouth and does the sucking or blowing in a blow job; the person who does the rimming in a rim job.
Leave a Reply