Yesterday’s ass-eating video clip led naturally, as these things do, to back-channel conversations about the nomenclature around what the dictionary people delicately call “erotic stimulation achieved by contact between mouth and anus.”

The Wikipedia article on this sexual practice is under anilingus, where it is explained to be a sort of portmanteau of the Latin anus and -lingus, from lingere (to lick). However in English the spelling has morphed until it is more often seen as analingus than anilingus. Thus the Wikipedia editors, though not yet Miriam Webster, accept both spellings.

If dog Latin wasn’t fun, schoolboys and cunning armchair linguists wouldn’t have done so much of it since the empire fell. But what does all of this have to do with rimming and salad tossing? Here I shall let The Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms by Jordan Tate take up the taxonomical tale, even if (having been published in 2007) it no longer feels so very contemporary:

A derivation of eating out, tossing salad is a derogatory term aimed at emasculating homosexual men, by implying that because of their sexual orientation, they are inherently less masculine. When this euphemism was popularized, it only described the act of a man performing analingus on another man. The propagation of the term stemmed from the results of mixing various greens and dressing to achieve an even coating on each leaf. It was assumed that this type of care and precision was taken to coat the anus in saliva and prepare the anus for anal intercourse. It is this logical leap that hindered the initial popularity of tossing salad and why its origin still remains a mystery to so many. Tossing salad soon came to describe any sessions of analingus where the tongue penetrates the sphincter (thereby differentiating it from a “rim job”) regardless of intentions of anal intercourse.

And that, I think, is as much as most of us will ever need to know about the various terms for eating ass.

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