(high sexual content, not for kids or the sexually modest)
Lexicographic notes from Young America, heard on Facebook reels from bros in their 20s discussing sexual matters in a mostly bantering way: the verb to collab. Collected this morning (6/4), one bro to another:
When I collabed with Pepe, I was doing something I’d never done before … we were tossing each other’s salad
(to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’ — verb rim-2: [with object] vulgar slang lick or suck the anus of (someone) as a means of sexual stimulation (NOAD) — seems to be a recent slang idiom: in Urban Dictionary in this century, but not my other sources)
The sexual verb to collab and noun collab look like replacements for earlier verb to hook up and noun hookup:
— verb hook up (with): 1 to meet … 2 to form a relationship with; sexual or otherwise … 8 to be sexually active with someone, whether kissing or having sex (GDoS)
— noun hookup: 2 [a] informal an instance of people meeting, communicating, or cooperating: he had a phone hookup with his bosses later that day. [b] a casual sexual encounter: he was tired of meaningless hookups. [c] a person with whom someone has a casual sexual encounter: she’s hurt that her hookup didn’t even bother to stick around long enough to say good morning.
In both cases, a meeting or cooperating sense develops a sexual sense. For hook up and hookup the sexual sense then overwhelmed the original sense; these items came to seem too dirty, too vulgar, so the verb and noun collab (short for collaborate and collaboration) got recruited as less potent, less raunchy replacements. This is where things seem to stand now, but you can see where they’re likely to go next.
If the dude and his bro Pepe got into mutual rimming, they were probably at least sucking cock before that, not just making out, so they were already well down Raunch Road, and their talk of collabing will be understood as referring to some dick-involved act, at the very least a circle jerk (vulgar slang an act of group masturbation among males (NOAD)).
(I remind you again that the worlds of sexual desire, sexual practices, and sexual and gender identities are complex and multifarious.)
June 5, 2026 at 3:22 pm |
To clarify things. I wrote, probably in an over-compressed way:
intending to refer to the process by which the existing collab abbreviating the verb collaborate and noun collaboration in a number of *non-sexual* senses could be put to sexual use as well.
Now Gary Vellenzer has written me to note one of these many non-sexual senses:
June 6, 2026 at 9:05 am |
I have managed to misunderstand GV’s intentions again (I’m more than a little deranged by living in Death Valley Days). He wasn’t adding an example of *non-sexual* collab, but instead a fresh, and rather remarkable, sexual use. From his e-mail to me: