Happy new year! With the arrival of 2009, I bring you another unsolicited discussion about words.

I've been reading Dickens's Oliver Twist, which Nath was kind enough to give me as a holiday present. I haven't read any Dickens before, though we've enjoyed listening to Patrick Stewart's reading of A Christmas Carol ever since Chris gave it to us year ago. Through that reading, I've come to love the rhythm of Dickens's prose (made all the better through Patrick Stewart's delivery).

In this book we are introduced to a number of scofflaws and ne'er-do-wells, including Fagin (the old Jew), Bill Sikes, Jack Dawkins (The Artful Dodger), and Charley Bates. This last character, being a youth, is frequently referred to by Dickens as "Master Bates". Heh heh heh. Master Bates. Get it? Of course you do.

Now, let's reflect on this. We have to assume that Dickens did not intend this pun (I mean, it's not like Charley Bates spends the book, er, living up to his name). We also have to assume that he was intelligent enough to avoid introducing such an egregious pun unintentionally, since it disrupts the flow of the story for intelligent-but-puerile readers (i.e., me). The conclusion I come to is that the word "masturbate" simply wasn't in common usage at the time.

Is that possible? Well, the introduction to my copy of Oliver Twist claims that the book was serialized beginning in 1837, in a magazine for which Dickens was hired as editor. Looking up "masturbate" in the Oxford English Dictionary, we see that the first recorded use of the word in English was in 1839 (and the next after that was in 1880). The dictionary also tells us to compare with the french masturber, which was used by Marquis de Sade in 1787. (Interestingly, there are also several competing etymologies for the word.) Taking the OED as authoritative on first use, we can make a legitimate claim that indeed, Dickens might not have been aware of the word when he wrote Oliver Twist, despite his considerable vocabulary. We can assume that this wasn't a not-so-subtle bit of lowbrow humour at his character's expense (as funny as that would be).

Of course, this analysis leads inevitably to one other question. If masturbation was only invented in the early 1800s, what did people do before that to pass the time?