Yesterday I had a cute email from someone who said they liked my blog and that they had been into spanking forever. They even remember looking up the word spanking in the dictionary. I wonder how many people did that.
Sometime ago, someone else said that their earliest memory was reading a book where a woman says to a girl “You’re gonna get a spanking.” She couldn’t even remember anything else, but the word stayed with her for years and she said she imagined being the girl and all the different ways she might be spanked.
Just think about that for a minute.
Spanking
Why should a simple word cause such a flutter within the soul? Are there other words that have that same affect for others? Even now, with so many other associated words and phrases, nothing is as powerful as that one word.
Spanking
There said it again.
On a blog somewhere I remember a woman wrote that she had no spanking fetish until she was 19. Then one day she was accused of being out late with a boy drinking. If I recall, her and her cousin were cornered in the yard by her uncle and scolded. She said she just felt like a little kid again and denied everything. Then her uncle said to them something like ‘If you are lying to me I will take down your pants and trousers and give you a spanking on the bare bottom.’
She said she blushes now every time someone says ‘pants and trousers,’ even if it is just a shop assistant in a department store. But still the biggest rush for her is the actual word spanking.
I gather she was she was wearing jeans at the time, and oh for the American majority here, pants are panties in Britain and trousers are pants. See words again. I wonder how often the eroticism is lost in translation between the use of Standard (or International English) and American English?
For instance for me the word ass conjures up images of bible stories or at best it is a mere crudity. For different reasons the word arse also troubles me, but I have used both in dialogue sometimes where it has seemed appropriate.
It reminds me of the time a story got rejected because the American editor had a different take on the phrase “going commando under her mini skirt.”
If you are wondering why I have just launched into this; I had another email from someone complaining that I sometimes seemed to avoid the S word (that’s spanking in case you missed it). Not to take issue with the guy – I really don’t – but sometimes just for readability you have to avoid repetition of certain words and phrases. Actually it is the hardest part when writing in such a narrow field.
So can a word be used too much? Spanking; there I said it again, spanking. What do you think?
