To Orgasm
or
Not To Orgasm

New Mobility magazine is a pleasure to read. It is deliciously irreverent, catering to the trade, a Women's Wear Daily for the Disabled. It will often deal with subjects that the mainstream disabled magazines avoid: drugs, sex, self-image, history, and cant.

Recently, however, we found that they ignored one of the cardinal rules of the trade, and we wrote them, as follows:

I'd like to protest, and protest vigorously, the misuse of a favored word.

It's a word that you have callously squeezed, pushed, and pulled --- forcing it into a disgustingly repulsive stance.

In short, Mr. Editor, you have taken a lovely noun --- and made it into an obscene verb. Viz,

"to orgasm."

This abortion (if you will pardon the expression) appears at least twice in the October issue of New Mobility.

Since I am only in the habit of counting my own orgasms, not those of others ... there may have been further appearances of this unspeakable variant that I might not be aware of.

According to my faithful Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the proper definition is:

ORGASM \or-gáz-um\ n [fr. Gk orgasmos, fr organ --- to grow ripe, be lustful; akin to the Skt. urga --- sap, strength] (1763) intense or paroxysmal emotional excitement; esp: the climax of sexual excitement typically occuring toward the end of coitus --- orgasmic \or-gaz- mik\ also orgastic\gas-tik\ adj.

Outside of the patently sexist, homophobic, and anti-deviant nature of the definition, I suspect that you, Mr. Editor, will not encounter, in any form whatsoever, the letters vb, which stands for "verb." There is also no vi [verb, intransitive], nor vt [verb, transitive].

In the English language, there are times when we are allowed to transform nouns into verbs. For example, we are allowed to transform "a kiss" into "to kiss." We --- Noah Webster and I --- allow that.

We are also allowed to emit "a sigh," or, more simply, we "can but sigh." (As the old song would have it, "a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.")

For the juveniles in the crowd, there is even the shady possibility of translating "a feel" into the gerundive, "feeling" --- as in "feeling up." Webster and I will reluctantly allow them to get away with, as they would say, vul., "copping" such (and "copping to" such a noun.)

But we're damned if you can transform "an orgasm" into, ugh, "to orgasm." It isn't permitted without a waiver from the Grammar Police --- of which I am Captain.

I'd like to point out to you that degrading the English language with a phrase such as "to orgasm" is felonious, and since I am Captain of the Vice Squad, your sentence is to spend an hour in front of the blackboard, where you must write, clearly, 500 times or more, the sentence,

"I promise to go forth
and orgasm no longer."

--- R. R. Doister