At the end of the academic year, students in Arroyo, the Stanford
undergrad dorm which for the last seven years I've helped look after as
a ``Resident Fellow'', are eagerly looking for ways to procrastinate,
and one such way is taking a purity
test. It enables you to tally your sexual, drug or otherwise off-color adventures in a notches-on-a-stick, trophy-on-the-wall or kill-sticker-on-the-side-of-the-humvee sort of a way. Many students took this at the start of the year too, so
retaking the test provides them with a way to gauge the progress
they've made during the year. Progress here means loss of innocence.
As for language related issues, well, I learnt several interesting
words taking the test, but what I wanted to tell you about was this
wonderful example of recursion.... oh, you want to know what the dirty
words were first?
Cocrophilia
The purity tests define this as `marked interest in excrement; esp. the
use of
feces or filth for sexual excitement', and all the immediate google
hits are for purity test related material. The OED has never heard of
the word. Hey, has someone been making stuff up? Am I allowed to do that? [No: a reader points out that the OED does list coprophilia. It's from the Greek kopros, dung. So this is a spelling error that crept into an early purity test, now to be web-propagated for evermore.]
Frotteurism
Well, I guess everyone else knew what frotteurism was? It means rubbing
yourself on others without consent. At least the current
psychiatric diagnostic criteria take it to be non-consensual, and it's
only illegal
in most developed nations if non-consensual. I'm not sure if simply
liking to rub yourself on
someone legally and consensually has a name. Apparently the term
frottage is now outdated as
far as psychiatrists are concerned, though the
OED still takes frottage to
be the primary term. Perhaps because frottage
can mean also to take a rubbing, e.g. of wood, for an artwork. This
is apparently socially acceptable even without the wood's consent.
Seems a slippery slope to me. Anyhow, back to the sexual sense, I
particularly liked one of the OED's source quotes, from Ellis &
Ararbanel's 1961 Encyclopedia
of Sexual Behavior:
`Frotteurs are only truly perverted when they avoid
coitus and other sex acts.' So there you are: even if there was
that one time in the frathouse and you were totally wasted and, well,
yes, looking back, it was clearly a misdemenour, and no, he'll never
talk to you again, and what harm would there have been if that girlfriend of his hadn't told him, and well, it looked like she was passed out, so how could you have known what would happen, and it's pretty damn dubious in your opinion that she watched the whole thing without saying a word until two days after... at least you aren't a pervert.
Klismaphilia
Enemas for fun. Like cocrophilia, it isn't in the OED, but it seems to
have a fairly established currency on the web.
Mysophilia
No, don't look to the OED, but again the web is a rich source:
dependency on soiled and filthy stuff, e.g.
sweaty underwear, and used menstrual pads.
Scoptophilia
Here the OED does know the word, which it gives as `Sexual stimulation or satisfaction derived
principally from looking; voyeurism.' The purity test's
definition varies slightly but significantly: a dependency on looking
at sexual organs and
watching sexual activity openly, not surreptitiously, as in voyeurism.
Urophilia
In context, you'd certainly have guessed what urophilia is
(urine fetish), but the OED hasn't heard of that one either, although
it does know the word urolagnia,
which apparently has exactly the
intended meaning.
Umm, why did I begin this post. Oh yes, it was question 497. So the
thing is, the more Yes-answers you give on the purity test, the lower
your score, but question 497 runs as follows:
497.
Have you ever done
something for the sole purpose of lowering your Purity Test score?
Yes No
Please, just for me, take the test, answer yes, and thus make it so! This way Language
Log will soon be responsible for the largest drop in human purity since
the discovery of klismaphilia. But, you ask, is there a nice, long,
partially Greek word for someone who takes an almost sexual pleasure in
such a delicious recursion as question 497 invites? Recursarecursarecursa...philia? Mungagnia?
Naaah, the word is just geek,
I'm afraid. But don't worry if you fit the bill. Geeks are only truly
perverted when they avoid coitus and other sex acts.
[Update: see here, though, fittingly, it may be where you came from.]