Mind your language
DON'T mind my husband enjoying what he calls forty winks in his armchair at any time of day; it's when he snores that I feel his comportment requires adjustment. So his irony was unconscious when he said, 'Sleeping ain't the problem.' He was responding to the news on the television, which seems to have become something of an imaginary friend for him. There had been a reference to 'sleeping with a prostitute' in the context of a trial for perjury, of which I shall say no more.
But I did wonder when this rather coy euphemism for sexual intercourse became popular. Did people say, 'I'm not sleeping with him,' before Victorian days? Of course when I looked into it, I got a surprise.
The Oxford English Dictionary got round to sleep in 1919, by which time Sir James Murray, who was more like its mother than its onlie begetter, had been dead four years. Therefore he did not have to define meaning no. 2: 'implying sexual intimacy or cohabitation'. The first citation given is from around AD 900 in Alfred's Laws referring to what happens if a man is not married to a woman but 'hire mid slaepe' — sleeps with her. And about 100 years later Aelfric, the first Abbot of Eynsham (whose name is pronounced al-fritch, in case you want to discuss him at dinner parties), paraphrased Genesis icodx 7, the bit where Joseph is having a spot of bother with Potiphar's wife. 'His hlaefdige lufode hine,' Aelfric says, 'and cwaeth to him: Slap mid me.' The original is rendered in the King James Version (1611) as: 'His master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said: Lie with me.'
But Aelfric is being no less accurate in his rendering than King James's committee, for the Latin Vulgate translation of the phrase is Donni mecum — precisely 'sleep with me'. I do not know what the Hebrew is, and it would not mean much to me if I did, but the Greek verb used in the Septuagint is koimao, which gloriously covers almost anything that is synonymous with recumbency: lying down, resting, sleeping, being in bed, having sexual intercourse or being dead.
So sleeping with someone, it turns out, is no more a euphemism than lying in is for both 'oversleeping' or 'giving birth'. It has been used as an ordinary synonym in various languages for thousands of years. The only development that the OED has noticed since 1919 is sleeping around. That is a different story.
Dot Wordsworth
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