Back in the seventies my first wife and I used to socialize with a Berkeley couple, “Bryce” and Virginia,” both of whom were highly-educated, high-culture sorts. Virginia, then about twenty-three, was a woman of vast, effortless charm, perhaps deployed sometimes a tad carelessly, of such lofty sensibilities—what they used to call “breeding”—that one automatically checked one’s conduct in her company against any vulgar word or act: not that she would have been at all censorious (she was, on the contrary, one of the most imperturbably gracious people I’ve ever known), but because one dreaded seeming cheap or common in her sight.

We used to play Scrabble, the four of us. In one game, I was delighted to deploy all my tiles in a single go to form the word “fellatio.” Virginia frowned. “What’s that? Is that even a word?” My wife and I and Virginia’s husband all exchanged appalled glances, and the three of us attempted to convey, by means of the most delicate circumlocutions, the sense of the term. After a quarter of a minute Virginia broke in. “Oh, you mean a blow job!”

cordially,