Doing Her Doggy Style
This athletic bit of from-behind sexing-up is from a Peter Riverstone graphic novel:
I’ll take this occasion to mention one of the problems that plagues pornographers who work in the English language: there really isn’t a style manual one can consult that comes to good grip with some of our linguistic problems. For instance, what should be the proper orthography for doggy style sex? Is “doggy style” (rendered thus, as two unadorned words, and the orthography I currently prefer) the majority usage, as I suspect? We often see a hyphen (doggy-style) or a compound word (doggystyle). Sometimes we even see an alternative spelling with diminutive connotations (doggie style). Are there good reasons to prefer one of these alternate renditions? Let me know what you think, dear readers.
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Personally? I prefer doggy-style (hyphenated).
As I do strap-on, and blow-job.
I’m not an English major, so I don’t really know the rules, but it feels right to me, so I guess it’s mostly subjective…
I’d try take up a more academic approach, and look up the rules (if there are any), but I’m too busy giving myself a hand-job…
I’m not sure there actually are any prescriptivist rules for how language ought to change, when it inevitably does. I myself am an accelerationist; the end state in most cases is the new compound word like doggystyle and blowjob. But it doesn’t work for strapon because some weirdness of English pronunciation makes that look like it should be pronounced “strape-awn”. I tend to avoid hyphens except where it’s clearly the majoritarian preference (again, strap-on is the example here).
As you know, Dr. Whiplash, I spend more time worrying about “the rules” of English for adults than I probably should, in part because it genuinely affects my day-to-day activities and in part because nobody else seems to be doing it. You’ll remember me struggling with tit-fucking terminology last year…
There are rules for use of a hyphen that are general and probably longer than I want to reproduce here, but if (for example) you google “does doggy style have a hyphen” this is one of the first things that comes up:
“While the term is widely often used as an adverb (doing it doggy style), it can also be used as a noun (they prefer doggy style), modifier (the doggy-style position), and more pornographically, as a verb (to get doggy-styled).”
This is more or less correct by the rules, as use of 2 adverbs typically invokes the hyphen, as does the use of 2 adjectives which have a single idea. You can always resort to a good dictionary to check on any specific instance. (Personally I have an unabridged OED which has type small enough that it is sold with a magnifying disc to hover over the pages).
Oh and my mother was an english teacher, as were one grandmother, 2 aunts, and several great-aunts & cousins — this is where I get this tendency.
The way her left arm is drawn bothers me. It seems like she would want it palm down to better support her weight. Maybe we’re meant to think the guy is holding her up, but then he should have his hands on her shoulders, not her waist.
The artist clearly meant me to be looking at her ass, and yet her awkward hand position is the only thing I’ll remember about the picture in a month. Funny how that works.