Learn English – Where did the “trick” in the phrase “turning tricks” come from

etymologymeaning

Or in other words, can anyone make clear the etymology and the history behind the coinage of the word trick in the phrase turning tricks?

(Why am I interested you may ask? Well, turning tricks is a phrase with kind of a history for me. For a long time I didn't know what it meant — in one embarrassing moment for a middle-school kid who once believed that pimp was short for "pimple" — and for even longer, after I was clued into its sexual meaning, I thought it had to do with more, uh, athletic exploits than the phrase actually implies. You know, sort of a description of things that are sometimes jokingly said to be available in dark bars in Tijuana. So I'm determined to get to the root of this construction once and for all: why are johns also known as tricks, and who coined this very misleading phrase?)

Best Answer

I've got a possible interpretation, for which however, I'm afraid there is actually little hard evidence (but considering the scarcity of etymology studies dealing with prostitution professional vocabulary, this is hardly surprising). However if you connect the dots, it kind of makes sense.

For each dot, in the conjecture below, I will add a confidence level (abbreviated as CL), so that hopefully other contributors might fill the gaps.

Here it goes anyway:

It all comes from... Surprise, surprise.... French argot (slung).

  1. "trique" in popular French is a word for a wooden stick (CL 100%). French donkey's are sometimes motivated using "des coups de trique". It is believed to come from Northern French dialectal "estrique" and is akin to "strike" in English, "streik" in German and so on. Also gives "tricoter" (to knit) in French.
  2. "avoir la trique" or "triquer" means to have an erection (CL 100%).
    Passing the boundary between popular and argotic here.
  3. By extension "triquer" or "trequer" means, for a man to make love, in a careless/bestial way to his partner. (CL 100%). Please refer to a famous novel named "Prostitution" by Pierre Guyotat, easy to find on the web. Just Google for "Guyotat triquer" and you should net a large number of hits.
  4. The verb "triquer" used as "to have sex with a prostitute" was particularly common in the world of French prostitution in the previous century at least (CL 50%). Can't back this from personal experience, I'm afraid ;-).
  5. The idiomatic expression passes in the English language somehow (CL 20%).
  6. A trick in English in the context of prostitution has both the meaning of a customer or the act itself. (CL 100%).
  7. To "turn tricks" is to engage in acts of prostitution with "Johns" or "Tricks".

So you see, this is a possibility but there are a few gaps which I'm not able to fill with certainty.

Edit
Since this post was composed (more than one year ago) and as I researched the world of the French Impressionists, I came across additional info concerning the step in which the expression passes into English.
It is a well documented fact that the French industrial revolution was accompanied as everywhere else, by rural exodus, poverty, and an increase in the levels of urban prostitution. It is also possible to show that a proportion of French prostitutes emigrated to the US and various other destinations (even Australia) at that time (end of the 19th Century). Conversely, one can find examples of "petits femmes de Paris" having risen to a certain level of fame and wealth in the US at the time.
In summary, the possibility that the expression passes into English now seems less conjectural to me.

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