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Though Miss Poubelle did not have high expectations for Bridget Jones's Diary, she had to confess that the movie was a delightful bit of fluff. And it was an additional pleasure to hear Renee Zellweger's surprisingly good British accent as she discussed the hazards of a single woman in London looking for a good shag.

Had the movie been set in New York, she might have been looking for the same thing, but she wouldn't use that language. A twenty-something New Yorker would probably find fuck a bit coarse, and would have to resort to one of the long and not so lovely set of euphemisms. But the Brits are blessed with the verb to shag, which gets its meaning across without the violence or vulgarity of expressions like fuck, screw, or nail

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The Oxford English Dictionary says that the origin of shag is uncertain, but suggests a connection to the verbs shake and shog. Shake is familiar, shog less so. Shog is now largely obsolete, but it appears to have had about the same range of meanings as shake. This 1678 quote gives some sense of how shog was used: Now their [children's] Couch hangs in the Aire, within little Beds of coard, or little Chaires, where they shogge and rocke them. Both shake and shog have as their core meaning the idea of something moving back and forth.

To shag seems to be a third phonetic variant of this verb. As with shake and shog, there is an obsolete sense of the word in which refers to back and forth movement, as in the following Middle English example from 1378: And ye boot, amydde ye water, was shaggid "and the boat, amid the water, was shagged."

There are also cases in which the verb is used intransitively with the meaning "to wander (back and forth) aimlessly," as in a citation from 1932 where a character says, "He watched a familiar looking airedale dog shag about." More familiar is the transitive sense "to chase," applied especially to shagging fly balls, i.e. chasing after them. Miss Poubelle believes that the idea here is also that the person shagging flys must run back and forth to catch them.

The sense of shag meaning "have sex" goes back to the 18th century, and the first citation is in a British list of slang terms from 1788. From a verb referring to back and forth movement to a verb referring to sex is a logical step. But it appears to Miss Poubelle that this development must have been largely confined to Britain. She can find no evidence that Americans ever used the word shag to talk about sex. It does appear in Australian English, which has a more recent connection to the British.

Historically unrelated to these words are the noun shag and the adjective shaggy, both referring to long or bushy unkempt hair. These words come from the Old English sceacga "beard' while the back and forth words probably come from variants of a different Old English root, scacan "to push." Changes in the pronunciation of the words have caused them to end up sounding alike, but they're not historically related to each other.

Finally, there's one usage of shag we still must talk about. On the Carolina coast, people love to go out to hear beach music and do a dance we call the shag. The shag is a kind of modified jitterbug, with lots of swinging around, but no jumping. This must also have its origin in the back and forth motions of the dance, but Miss Poubelle doubts that many of the shaggers know why it has that name. And as enjoyable as the dance is, the shagging done on the Grand Strand has little connection to the shagging that went on in Bridget Jones's bedroom. Of course, the Southern Baptists condemn both Carolina shagging and London shagging, since-- by their reasoning-- one is so likely to lead to the other!