"Slap mid me!"

[steepholm]

Well, that's interesting. I was just thinking about the phrase "sleep with", as in "have sex with", and wondering when it came into common use. It seemed to me that it would feel odd to find the phrase in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, who/which both tend to use "lie with" where today we might say "sleep with". For example: "But if a man find a betrothed damosel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her, shall die"; "And so I lie with her, and she with me."

Perhaps because of this, "sleep with" has always felt like a euphemism to me, and one that until today I'd probably have dated (off the top of my head) to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when embarrassment about sexual matters became more common in polite society.

However, when I looked up "sleep with" in the OED, I found to my surprise that it goes deep into Old and Middle English:

a900 Laws Ælfred (Liebermann) Introd. §29 Gif hwa fæmnan beswice unbeweddode, and hire mid slæpe.
c1000 Ælfric Genesis xxxix. 7 His hlæfdige lufode hine and cwæð to him: Slap mid me!
a1325 (1250) Gen. & Exod. (1968) l. 967 Forð siðen ghe bi abram slep, Of hire leuedi nam ghe no kep.
c1386 Chaucer Sir Thopas 78 An elf queene shal my lemman be, And slepe vnder my goore.
a1400 Trevisa's Higden (Rolls) VII. 143 A clerk of þe court hadde i-sleped wiþ hire.

At that point, though, the list of citations stops, and takes a four-century gap before popping up again with Shelley:

1819 Shelley Cenci i. iii. 15 Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival.
1898 Sessions Paper of Central Criminal Court Feb. 266 He has been sleeping with my wife. How would you like it?
1928 A. Huxley Point Counter Point xxvii. 445 ‘Sleeping around’—that was how he had heard a young American girl describe the amorous side of the ideal life, as lived in Hollywood.

Did the phrase "sleep with" really drop out of common use for all those centuries? Pushed out, perhaps, by "lie with"? A glance at the OED's citations for the latter phrase suggest that this is indeed possible. They range from 1300 to 1750, which plugs the gap pretty neatly.

Of course, the OED isn't exhaustive, but it is indicative. And I have to get used to the idea that "sleep with" isn't a niminy-piminy expression after all, but pure Anglo-Saxon. (And the Anglo-Saxons, like ourselves but unlike the Jacobeans, could both sleep and have sex standing up [see Knee trembler].)

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'Slap mid me'

Lends a whole new meaning to 'a bit of slap and tickle', so it does!

I'll have to check my 17th century sources.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'll be interested to see what you come up. I wouldn't expect a total absence of "sleep with", but I would expect "lie with" to be more common, if my theory's right. (It would be interesting too to see if there are regional or class differences.)

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language, cites The Two Noble Kinsmen, V iv:

WOOER: [to the Jailer's Daughter.] ~~~ Come, sweet, we'll go to dinner,
And then we'll play at cards.
DAUGHTER: ~~~ And shall we kiss too?
WOOER: A hundred times.
DAUGHTER: ~~~ And twenty.
WOOER: ~~~ ~~~ Ay, and twenty.
DAUGHTER: And then we'll sleep together.
DOCTOR: [to the Wooer.] ~~~ Take her offer.
WOOER: [to the Jailer's Daughter] Yes, marry, will we.
DAUGHTER: ~~~ But you shall not hurt me.
WOOER: I will not, sweet.
DAUGHTER: ~~~ If you do, love, I'll cry.

and Titus Andronicus, II iv:

Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As have thy love?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks - is that the lot for Shakespeare? If so, it seems relatively thin pickings, especially as the second example is a maybe a bit of a stretch.

I've been trying to find examples in the King James Bible, so far without success - the only people anyone sleeps with in that are their fathers! For sex it seems to prefer "come in unto" or "lie with".

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

There are instances in the Douai-Rheims bible (1582): see Deuteronomy 28:30; Genesis 30:15, 16; Deuteronomy 21:13
2 Samuel 11:11; 2 Samuel 12:24; Numbers 5:13, 19; Genesis 35:22.

This list is probably not exhaustive.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting. None of those are rendered that way in the KJV. I shall have to check the Geneva Bible next, I think.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yes, Geneva and KJV, change Douay's "Sleep with her" in Deuteronomy 28:30 to "lie with her."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It seems fairly systematic. Presumably at some point a group of men in ruffs must have sat round a table and had a serious conversation about which expression to go with. If only they'd chosen "canoodle"! The Bible might have sold more copies.

(I see this week you and Proust are in the letters page of the TLS! Where next?)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I sent them that letter after finding I'd already half-written it when I went digging up my LJ entry about that photo to reply to your comment!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The Sir Thopas example, like the rest of the poem, is more than a bit dubious. However, the rest of the medieval passages seem unambiguously sexual.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Agreed about Thopas. More generally, I still think it's odd (and in a way that says nothing complimentary about the sexual prowess of the Anglo-Saxons) that the words for sex and for sleep should be one and the same.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Aelfric's 'Slap mid me!' is a precise translation of the Vulgate: 'Dormi mecum' (Genesis 39:7).

J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, says of 'dormio cum' (sleep with), 'Examples are numerous' while of 'iaceo cum' (lie with) he says that it 'is especially widespread' (p. 177). He also cites paralell examples from Greek.

I note that apart from the Chaucer citation, the early citations in OED are all in some sense learned: a legal code, a translation of Genesis, a verse paraphrase of Genesis, a work by a historian.

Moreover, the Douai-Rheims bible is a direct translation of the Vulgate.

I am guessing the use of 'sleep with' and 'lie with' may have been influenced by Latin sources. And that when the translators of the Authorised Version opted for 'lie with', the influence of that text may have largely suppressed the use of 'sleep with' in written sources.

Which raises the question of exactly when, and why, it became widespread in popular use.

Shelley's usage might be explained by the fact that he was an excellent classical scholar.

Two more questions, which I cannot answer: what was the Hebrew word/expression that the AV translators rendered 'lie with' and the Vulgate by 'dormio cum'?

And was there an old Germanic euphemism equivalent to 'sleep with' and/or 'lie with'?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Very interesting - thank you - and yes, I think that all seems plausible. Of course, the OED has a selection bias towards elite usages, so is of limited use in answering some these questions.

Perhaps some of the Hebrew readers on this list (if anyone but us is still reading) can answer your question about Hebrew.

As for older Germanic euphemisms for sex, I'm not sure they'd have been necessary unless they felt that sex was somehow shameful, which presumably there's no reason to expect until they start picking up on that (particularly post-Augustine) element in Christianity - which would not have pre-dated their exposure to Latin.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

The Hebrew in Deuteronomy 28:30 is "ישגלנה", which seems to have only the meaning of intercourse (okay, that's a euphemism too: copulation, then). It comes from a root -- "שגל" -- whose primary meaning is given as mistress, but which can also be -- well, here, from Google Translate:

mistress פילגש, גבירה, מאהבת, בעלה, אהובה, שגל

concubine פילגש, שכובה, שגל, מאהבת, לחנה

paramour מאהב, מחזר, בועל, שגל

woman אשה, נקבה, בת חוה, שגל

wife אשה, רעיה, זוגה, בת זוג, אשת חיקו, שגל

consort בת זוג, בן זוג, ספינת לווי, שגל

"שגל" being the only term all these have in common, it certainly seems to be a vividly gendered word for a sexual partner, which suggests the Vulgate (and maybe the Septuagint?) cleaned it up. If KJV really did translate this out of the original tongues, they also compared the Hebrew with the Vulgate and presumably with the Septuagint (though I don't know), and probably decided to use the slightly less euphemistic euphemistic that gives it its peculiar charm today.

My Hebrew is primitive, so this is all pretty speculative.

John Berryman, plumping for pre-KJV translations of the Bible (Geneva and before), likes their idiomatic English. I wonder whether "sleep with," even if classically derived, was feeling too idiomatic to the KJV translators? Or is that anachronistic: that it feels too idiomatic to us, but to them just too euphemistic.

(In other news, I lectured on Macbeth the other day, and spent some quality time [high or low, I don't know] discussing or rather speculating on James I's embracing of the numeral, as what Shakespeare may have been underscoring in so insisting on the line of Banquo's children even to the edge of doom. It's okay to say there'll be more Jameses, when this one dies: as King of Scotland he's already VI, and now as King of England, his mother murdered by the childless Elizabeth, her children, and also his, will be kings.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's brilliant. And I'm delighted to know that you lectured on James's regnal number. This is the kind of thing that validates my maunderings!