Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

When Miss Poubelle was grow- ing up in small town South Carolina, there must have been some high school kids who were having sex, but there wasn't much evidence of it. Nobody was obviously pregnant, and abortions were carried out discreetly across the border in Georgia.

But there was plenty of making out. In that time and place, couples drove down to the river on the weekends, drank beer or Southern Comfort, and made out in the car. And when they came back to school on Monday, the evidence of their weekend could often be found on their necks. Girls would suddenly come in wearing scarves or turtlenecks, and their friends would exchange meaningful glances, knowing that someone had probably earned a passion mark over the weekend. Passion mark was our somewhat quaint term for the bruises that result from sucking and biting on a person's skin. Now that Miss Poubelle lives outside the South, she's found that few people are familiar with this localism, and that the general American term for such a bruise is a hickey.

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Passion marks were generally regarded as shameful for a good girl, and Miss Poubelle recalls a number of improbable excuses involving popcorn poppers and curling irons. Boys by contrast seemed to wear their marks with a certain cocky pride, and gained the admiration of their peers by their ability to get a girl to suck their neck. Miss Poubelle even recalls hearing the suspicion that some such marks were self-inflicted, an attempt to gain social prestige among the 15-year-olds.

Hickey is primarily an American (and Canadian?) term, and the British equivalent is normally love bite. The origins of the terms passion markand love bites are obvious. But where does the peculiar word hickey come from?

The ever-helpful Oxford English Dictionary comes to our aid. According to the OED, the first recording of hickey comes from 1934. But what is surprising is that in the early uses, hickey does not refer to a bruise that results from lovemaking, but to a pimple or a raised spot on the skin. In a song from that year, there is a line "Godamighty made a 'gator wid hickies all over his Tail." Hickey at this point seems to be referring to the wart-like bumps on an alligator's skin. At about the same time, hickey was also being used to refer to what we would now call a pimple or a zit. A magazine advertisement from 1937 says "Hickies spoil everything. I know. I had 'em until I began eating Fleischmann's yeast."

It's not too hard to see the connection between these various kinds of markings or irregularities on the skin. But for most speakers of American English, these uses of hickey referring to pimples and bumps are archaic and surprising. Miss Poubelle does not believe that she has ever heard anyone use the word hickey in this way.

There is some evidence that the meaning of the word has changed in other parts of the English-speaking world, as well. In a 1990 story in a New Zealand magazine, the writer Rachel Bush includes a long monologue from her elderly aunt Elspeth. Talking about a fictional character, Elspeth says (in part) "I wish you'd write something about a woman lawyer.... Now the trouble with you is that you'll do something dreadful like give her a nasty red hickey-- I mean zit-- I know what hickies means nowadays." It seems from this dialogue that the meaning of the word has changed within in the memory of some English speakers.

Hickey itself appears to be a shortened form of the word doohickey, which is one of the family of words like thingamabob that we use when we don't know or can't remember the name of something. So originally any kind of marks on the skin were probably originally called doohickies, later shortened to hickies, and finally restricted in use just to the sort of bruises that result from kissing and sucking.

At this point in Miss Poubelle's life, passion marks, love bites, and hickeys are all pretty much a thing of the past, and seem like kid stuff compared to the sort of sex that adults usually have. For Blanche and most of her friends, it seems that once we moved on to sucking other thingamabobs, doohickies on the neck lost much of their appeal. But Miss Poubelle would not be surprised to find that there is some connection between the erotic fascination with vampires and the passion marks of adolescence. When we read Anne Rice's vampire novels, does the erotic thrill come from our recollections of a time when sucking the neck of a partner was as far as we dared to go?