Euphemistically Speaking.

I keep on seeing references to ‘twerking’ on the seedier side of the web (the Yahoo home page, mostly, squeezed between the torrents of cheap celebrity gossip) and I’ve become increasingly curious as to what it means, so tonight I consulted the Urban Dictionary.

‘The provocative shaking of the lower fleshy extremities,’ it said.

Lower fleshy extremities? That’s a bit ambiguous, isn’t it? I can think of various bits that might have the terms ‘lower’ and ‘fleshy extremities’ applied to them, so to which bits are they referring exactly? I extended my research to Wiki.

Ah, buttocks. Why didn’t they just say buttocks? Do I need a parental consent button on my computer, or something? Would that gain me access to the post-watershed, adult version of the Urban Dictionary?

This reminds me of a classic Monty Python sketch, in which a staid TV interviewer talks to a man with three buttocks. It plays on the fact that respectable BBC interviewers of the time were greatly inclined to employ respectable euphemisms, and so he tries ‘Your posterior. Your derriere. Your sit-upon.’

The bemused subject eventually takes the meaning and says ‘Oh, me bum!’

‘Quite,’ replies the embarrassed interviewer. ‘Now, I gather… how can I put this? I gather you have a fifty percent bonus in the botty department.’

‘I got three cheeks, yeah.’

That was forty years ago. Aren’t we a bit beyond it by now?