"Its origins are obscure. It’s first recorded by Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785. It’s thought by some to derive from an older sense of the verb that meant to shake about. We don’t know where that came from, either, though it’s probably connected to shake. This meaning fits the later one very well and it’s similar to the way that frig evolved (incidentally, a word whose constituency is pretty much the inverse of shag, being much better known in America than in Britain): at first this meant to move back and forth and then later evolved senses like to copulate and to masturbate. In the nineteenth century, shag was considered very vulgar in Britain and examples in print are rare (perhaps the best known is from that invaluable Victorian word fount, lexicographically speaking, the porno newsletter Pearl). The noun, for an act of copulation, dates only from the 1930s." |
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