Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Blanche has recently noticed a new slang term for sex-- alternately to hit that or to hit it. These two variants seem to have appeared in the last two or three years, and are particularly concentrated in music that appeals to young urban men. Hit that appears in the lyrics to a 2003 song by Offspring, which read (in part):

He's sayin' "Now I'm on a run
I'm chasing guys for fun"
My baby daddy
It ain't his only one."
She's sayin' "Now I'm on a run
I'm chasing guys for fun."
I know you wanna Hit That
I know you wanna Hit That, Hit That

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In this context, hit that means "to have sex," and the lyrics show it can have both males and females as a subject.

The site www.urbandictionary.com also shows several entries for hit it and hit that from 2003, with a similar definition: "Vernacular, commonly used by males, meaning, 'I would like to have sexual relations with that female.'" Though the Offspring lyric probably shows a female subject for the idiom, all the user-supplied definitions and examples at this site have male subjects and (implied) female objects. A typical example of how the idiom is used is the following exchange:

"Wow, is Halle Berry hot, or what?!"
"Yeah, I'd hit it..."

It is possible that there may also be an example from a 2001 song by a group called The Donnas. The lyrics to their song "Do you wanna hit it" are a bit ambiguous, but they include the lines

I got enough to split it
Do you wanna hit
We're never gonna quit it
Do you wanna hit it

Since the previous lines talk both about "contraband" and about taking off ones underwear, Miss Poubelle is unsure whether this part is about taking a hit (e.g. from a bong) or about hitting it (in the sexual sense).

It seems it or that originally refers to a part of the body like the ass. There are a number of examples on the internet of a phrase like hit that ass, many of them occurring in rap/hip-hop lyrics, generally in examples like I'd like to hit that ass. And Nelly is quoted in a 2002 Playboy interview as saying "I guess it's kind of typical, but I like the doggy [style]. I like to hit that ass from the back."

The semantic connection between having sex and bodies hitting each other is a pretty obvious one, and one that has reoccurred many times in the history of English. Our venerable word fuck probably has a distant etymology as a word meaning "to strike, to hit." Though dictionaries disagree, many relate the Middle English fucken "to fuck" to the Middle Dutch verb fokken "to strike, to copulate with." There is a similar idea behind the use of the words bang, poke, and knock (up).

Slang like this gave Andrea Dworkin and other anti-sex feminists fits, for they viewed it as linking sex to violence against women. There are certainly plenty of aspects of attitudes towards women that could use improvement in our society. The lyrics of some hip-hop numbers are masterpieces of misogyny, full of very explicit talk about women as bitches and hos, who put out for drugs, money, alcohol, and the desire to be near famous musicians.

Hit that may be initially a bit startling as an idiom for sex. But Miss Poubelle suspects that it is more a reflection of a the vivid image of bodies bouncing against each other than a prescription for violence against women. In a society that too often explicitly promotes mindless and degrading attitudes toward women, new and vivid slang is probably the least of our problems.