Their First Handjobs

Sex education isn’t what it used to be. And neither, it seems, is a journalism degree:

I believe “first-hand job experience” would have delivered the desired visual impact here, but the headline as printed does raise an interesting question: when writing about a handsie, is the preferred orthography “hand job”, “handjob”, or “hand-job”?

My own preference is for the portmanteau word “handjob” but in all such matters, I like to go to Google, enclose the various candidates in quotation marks, and count how many returns Google says it has in its database. Here, the results in ascending order are:

Hand job: 33.9 million
Hand-job: 34.1 million
Handjob: 359 million (!!!)

So, by that measure, my preference is the winner ten times over. But, interestingly, Google’s on-page supplemental information varies across the three spellings. “Handjob” has a clinical Wikipedia entry with an on-page summary, but “hand job” gets an on-page dictionary definition, a cross-link to the search results for “handjob”, and a completely spurious book review box to a Google Books entry about hand-made typography. “Hand-job” gets the wikipedia link and the typography book, but not the cross-link or the definition.

Is my geek showing? Maybe, yeah.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• An Attentive Handjob
• A Successful Handjob
• Pounding Uranus
• Enthusiastic Handjob Demonstration
• Hand Job On A Summer Day

Bishops: Sex Abuse Rules!

I really think they meant this headline to be “Bishops Agree To Sex Abuse Rules”, but sadly, somebody in Ireland flailed:

Of course, it may look different by the time you see it.