Doing the Hokey Pokey

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 8, 2007 3:27PM

We here at the Chicagoist offices like to think of ourselves as pretty hep and with it cats. (We know, we know, even constructing that sentence means that we’re not). So we like to keep up with everything that’s going on in the world, political culture and pop, art and beauty, love and war.

What comes with that knowledge is that the things we must learn to make it in this world are not the things our parents learned. We are a different generation, no matter what letter defines us, and what we endure is not what our parents endured.

Enter Jordan Tate, author of A Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms. Jordan has compiled an A to Z guide of all sexual euphemisms under the sun. We felt pretty confident that we knew what a lot of these were, right? Everyone knows about the Dirty Sanchez, or Buffing the Banana. Hell, we even made up a bunch of our own back in the day (anyone want to know what the White Glove is? Anyone?).

We haven’t seen the actual book, but checked out some of the reviews and were quite miffed (or muffed as the case may be) by a couple of entries: Yodeling in the Valley? Postman? Reaganomics? We think we can figure out what the Little Dutch Boy is, but what about the Little Red Riding Hood?

Tate uses each one in a sentence, accompanies the definitions with drawings and gets into some pretty raunchy stuff; which is par for the course when you’re making a dictionary.

Either way, now we know what we’re bringing to our next “Turtling the Hare” party.

You can see Jordan Tate on Friday, February 9th, at 7:00 p.m. at Quimbys, 1854 W. North Ave.