[Peace-discuss] Current occupants: Who knew?

[Szoke, Ronald Duane]

_occupy_.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this was the principal euphemism  for cohabitation in general  and sexual INTERCOURSE in particular.  Consider the following ditty, from Capt. Francis Grose's  _A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_ (1796) : 
	All you that in your beds do lie
	Turn to your wives,  and occupy
	And when that you have done your best, 
	Turn a-se to a-se and take your rest.

So tarred was "occupy" by its secondary, euphemistic meanings that it was virtually banned from polite English in any sense at all for almost 200 years.   As early as 1597, William Shakespeare noted _what_ was happening in  _Henry IV_, Part 2:  "A captain! God's light. these villains will make the word as odious as the word 'occupy,'  which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted . . ."   Some years later, his contemporary, Ben Jonson, explained _why_ it happened:  "Many, out of their own obscene apprehensions,  refuse proper and fit words -- as _occupy_, _nature_ and the like, so the curious industry of some, of having all alike good, hath come nearer a vice than a virtue"  (_Timber:  Of Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter_,  "De Stilo," ca. 1640).   The shunning of "occupy" was so total that the _Oxford English Dictionary_  included a special note on the phenomenon:  "The disuse of this verb in the 17th and most of the 18th c. is notable.  Against 194 quots. for 16th c.,  we have for 17th only 8 outside the Bible of 1611 (where it occurs 10 times), and for 18 c. only 10, all of its last 33 years.  .  .  .  This avoidance appears to have been due to its vulgar employment..  .  .  . "  See also F------.  

	--- Hugh Rawson, in _A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk_  (Crown Publishers, 1981), p. 197.