Learn English – Did they say “hand job” in the 1800s

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Did they say "hand job" in the 1800s? I was watching an episode of Deadwood, and they just said it.

For example, from episode 6 "Plague":

(Al enters the back room, Dolly is scrunched up on the bed, her head resting on her knees, she’s crying)

Al: You better have a payin’ dwarf underneath you.
Dolly: Am I dying?
Al: Turn off the fuckin’ water, and tell me what you did. I know you didn’t fuck him.
Dolly: No…
Al: You suck his prick?
Dolly: He didn’t want to show it to me ‘til he had a hard on.
Al: That’s what you call a mistake of youth. You mug it up with him?
Dolly: A little.
Al: French lock or normal?
Dolly: Normal.
Al: So any hoople head who drank from the same glass this guy did, have as much
right to sit there weepin’ as you, except I can’t kick his ass and send him out to work.
Dolly: My mom died of it when we was coming out. And that’s when daddy gave us up.
Al: Well, that sad story makes me believe maybe you was exposed and ain’t a
candidate for it no more. (Dolly stops crying – sorta – and looks at Al) Stick to hand jobs a day or two if you like.

Best Answer

The show you're talking about, Deadwood, was pretty famous for its language anachronisms, especially when it came to swearing. (A coincidence that one of its main characters is named Swearingen?)

From "Talk Pretty" on Slate:

In interviews, [David Milch, the creator and show runner of Deadwood,] has insisted that the show, particularly the flamboyantly vulgar dialogue, is based on rigorous historical research. Milch might be right that the quantity of swearing is historically accurate , but his show's language is dotted with obvious neologisms (one character uses the term "triangulate"; a drug addict refers to some opium as "good shit"). Some dimly literal-minded critics have used Milch's assertions against him, tallying up discrete anachronisms and mistaking these for aesthetic shortcomings. This is predictable but unfortunate, as it is precisely the dense mix of accuracy and artifice that makes Deadwood such a gorgeous creation.

New York Magazine concurs:

Did 1870s Americans really use such colloquially foul language with the Tourettic frequency of a Hollywood producer?

Jesse Sheidlower, the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and the scholar of cussing who wrote The F-Word, says probably not. Not that frontiersmen were genteel. “There were cursing contests when cowboys would get together and insult each other,” he says. But “the evidence that we have is that they were using more religious blasphemy than the sexual insults which are popular today.” And on the show.

As with his earlier boundaries-of-taste-pushing series, NYPD Blue, Milch’s dialogue is designed to let viewers know they’ve entered a world with different standards. So fuck or fucking is used 43 times in the first episode of Deadwood. Sheidlower agrees that the F-word was in use back then. But he says most of the nonsexual uses of it—as an intensifier, for example—didn’t come about until around World War I.

All in all, I would say it's fairly unlikely that anyone in 1876 knew what a "hand job" might be, at least not the way we understand that term today.

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