Why wasn Wordhunt evidence kinky enough for the OED?
Wordhunters rejoiced when they uncovered a 1942 citation of the word kinky in a book about the American underworld. The sentence read “She smelled of kinky lusts and savage dances and phallic wonders and primitive art”. Surely this was an antedating of the term kinky in a sexually adventurous sense? Apparently not…. Peter Gilliver, OED Associate Editor: There’s no question that a sentence about “kinky lusts” is referring to rather way-out sexual predilections. But there are two different senses of kinky that “fit” the context: one meaning more generally “queer, eccentric”, and the other – the one we asked Wordhunters to help with – meaning specifically “sexually perverted”. In fact the more general sense seems now to be rather less common – kinky now more usually has the specific meaning. But when we have a sentence in which kinky is combined with another word (“lusts”) which is itself sexual, we can’t be sure that kinky carries the specific sexual meaning. The meaning of the sentence
