Good morning, fuzzies! I hope that you’ve had a good weekend! Welcome to spring! What better time than now to talk about Messerschmitts and oral sex, as the old saying goes :3 (I have marked this adult, but it will be pretty tame) So, somebody asked why it’s called a “blow job” if there is less blowing than sucking. In the context of this discussion, it transpired that they were also surprised to hear that the phrase was common slang for jet aircraft following their first appearance in World War II. What followed was a discussion about whether or not this was meant innocently, or whether those filthy soldiers intended it as innuendo all along. Anyway. You know what I’m going to say, right? You already know where this is going! I don’t even need to write the rest of this Cohost-post (Co-Post)? (But I’m going to) But here, I’ll bring the happy ending forward: I don’t think anyone knows where it came from, and it’s conceivable that it is not, per se, knowable. Using the Dog Etymology Cutesiness Razor, about the only thing we can we say for certain is that the idea it derives from “below job”—as in a job done “below”—is hogwash. There. Now that that’s spoiled, there’s something else we should get out of the way early. Sexual slang, in particular, is difficult to track down, even today. It’s not necessarily something that people write out, and less so one that people record. This is doubly so for *very* old terms. People have been having sex for at least 260-odd years, and possibly much longer,^{[citation needed]} but it’s definitely not a given that a term common to, I dunno, Liverpudlian prostitutes in the 18th century would’ve been captured. It is *also* doubly so for marginalized groups. “Blow” and “suck” as references to fellatio are both, probably, not *that* old—the earliest written references the OED lists are from 1933 and 1902, respectively. But “blow,” in particular, seems to have originated as slang amongst gay men, or at least held the most currency there. We can see this in two ways. One, that the early attestations are literally so associated. 1933, for example: >Sexy sailors blow! Bawdy boys run riot on high seas as fags stir emotions of rollicking rovers. But also, that for 30 years after that, the other place where we can see “blow job” used is in court reporting, where the term generally has to be defined, and almost invariably involves two men being accused of sodomy. There are scattered counterexamples through the 1940s, and one I’ve found as early as 1938, but it’s really not until the 60s that it seems to become more general-purpose of a term, and as late as the middle part of that decade it still sometimes had to be defined. (Andy Warhol’s 1964 [film of that name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blow_Job_(1964_film)) may have, to some degree, introduced the phrase to the public consciousness, since it’s the point at which it begins to show up in newspapers again. Of course it’s also possible that it’s just the point at which it became acceptable to *print* in said newspapers) This takes us back to the original topic of discussion, and the one conclusion I feel most comfortable asserting: “bawdy” as sailors might be, I’m pretty sure the use of “blow job” to refer to jet- or rocket-powered aircraft was not meant as innuendo. My confidence rests on four grounds. One, the sexual slang doesn’t seem to have been in especially common use. We know this because papers were willing to print the phrase, both in the jet plane sense and in a related period slang sense of “a safecracking carried out with explosives,” and also because it would still need defining as far as the general public was concerned for another 20 years. So even if your intent was a double-entendre, it’s one you would’ve had to explain to almost everyone. Two, I don’t see airmen copping to knowing, or using, a phrase predominantly associated with gay men at a time when that was still often criminal. If innuendo *was* the intent, I don’t see unit commanders standing for it, but just in general its early uses are so often either cast as pejorative or as something “those people” do that it’s hard to see it being used affectionately for one’s own aircraft, as appeared in *Aviation* news (as reprinted in the *St. Joseph Gazette* on 14 December, 1944):

Jet Planes Are “Blow Job”

Jet propulsion fighter trainers are just “blow jobs” to flight and ground crews. Credit army air force squadrons based at Muroc army airfield and other Mojave Desert bases with coining the name that will tag American jet propulsion fighter trainers wherever they appear.

Well out of the experimental phase of testing, the JPs are engaging daily in the tactical training of bombing and fighter groups in California skies.

Three, and sort of an intersection of the first two: it doesn’t really make sense? For “tee hee, we call the jet planes the same thing as we call fellatio” to land as a joke *by itself* it would have to be a widely used phrase—it’s not as if, to take a similarly somewhat-pejorative phrase, Roomba were today to run an ad praising its new vacuum’s carpet munching skills. It’s a lot more like if I saw a car described as a lemon and told you it was a sly reference to shipping Draco and Jim Kirk. And there is no good reason to overcomplicate things: “blow job” is self-obviously descriptive for a job that involves blowing; it was used in that context, without needing explanation, through the 30s and and early 40s. If it’s meant to reference the act, are blow jobs good or bad? If they’re good, why would the German Me 262 get the name? If they’re bad, why would it be used by the folks at Muroc? But also, four, this isn’t really an “if”? Blow jobs are definitely bad? It’s pretty clear from the writing that it was not something polite people did—either receiving or performing. The act itself was risqué and scandalizing for both parties, and possibly depraved. As late as 1970, a New York appeals court was compelled to write:

[…]The doctor was asked what the term fellatio meant or what the vernacular term for that act was and he answered “blow job.” This incongruity of acts is what “seemed so crazy about his behavior.” It fits, said the witness, the basic definition of schizophrenia. Fellatio is not per se a symptom of schizophrenia [emphasis mine]

Which is one of the weirder things I’ve seen in print while doing this kind of research. But anyway, there’s a lot of extremely old and weird and Problematic language in the way this gets talked about (sample: “in a ‘blow job’ he is always in the role of a woman”) and it’s a fairly stark reminder of how dramatically cultural attitudes have shifted. In any case, even if it was a phrase in common usage *as sexual slang*, it seems unlikely that it was the kind of thing soldiers would’ve wanted the Army Air Corps’ newest hot thing to be associated with. So where *does* it come from? Like I said, I don’t know. Others, looking into this, have suggested that “blow” might have originally been a term for bringing someone to orgasm. That’s certainly possible. “Blow” was also 19th century slang for smoking (as in a pipe). It was turn of the century American slang for treating someone (“*to blow off*, to treat to drinks), leading to e.g. this 1896 attestation: >I noticed that you’d been talking bicycle lately, but I didn’t know you were going to get one. >I’m goin’ to do the sucker act and blow myself. Ahem. It’s also possible that it’s just formed by a ironic inversion of “suck,” the way “aw, man, this blows” (from no later than the early 1960s) seems to have led to “this sucks” a decade later. “Blows” in that sense was probably not sexual, as such—“blow” in the sense of a general curse or an exclamation of anger (“blow me!”) dates from the early 19th century. (I imagine today the meaning has merged such that saying “blow me” is no longer really the same phrase, and despite sharing the same words—that it is going to be closer to, y’know, “suck my dick.” This is similar to how I suggested that [phrases can look identical and still be unrelated](https://cohost.org/kojote/post/449537-have-a-d-n-tootin) back when we talked about “rootin’, tootin’.” But in any event, that’s not how it was commonly used up through the 1950s) Or that it formed in the same sense as to blow an engine, or to blow a seal, or perhaps by metaphor from “blow away” in the sense of destroying something, the way the later sense of “blow one’s mind” (i.e. on drugs, later more generally) did. I’m not sure! Your guess is as good as mine. And if you have a guess you’d like to share, by all means—do the sucker act and blow yourself.

Andréa, Canis Lanonbinary

@CERESUltra

Music Nerd, Author, Yote!