In English, there is no generally acceptable verb for someone to say the equivalent of "to sex." All our equivalents are either too vulgar ("to fuck", "to bang", "to smash") or too formal ("to copulate", "to reproduce") for use in everyday speech. The most general term, "to have sex," separates the subject from the act of sex in an obtrusive way which turns "sex" into an indirect object and the other person in a direct object in a way. I don't think many people register this separation of subject and direct object in the phrase "He had sex with her" but why is there no simple transitive verb of "to have sex" as in "He sexed her?" Does English's roots of German, French, or Latin have verbs along the lines of "to sex" that aren't considered vulgar?
Verbs – Why is it “to have sex” instead of “to sex”?
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It is certainly colloquial, and there are formal settings in which I wouldn't use it. Wiktionary marks it as "colloquial", and Merriam-Webster even as "slang". That being said, the word is not as "bad-boy" as many others, and is even acceptable in formal writing, depending on your audience. One famous example that immediately comes to mind is Roger Ebert's review of "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo":
[...] Rob Schneider [(director and leading actor)] took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times [wrote that the movie was] "sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic." Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein [in an open letter]: "[...] Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers." [...] Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" [...] As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
In fact, Mr. Ebert, an acclaimed and well-respected film critic with an impressive record, went on to publish an entire book titled "Your movie sucks".
The English word commentator comes directly from Medieval Latin commentator. However, this Latin ancestor is labelled as rare and some dictionaries don't have it.
Classical Latin does not use commentator but instead prefers commentor.
Both are formed after the verb commentārī, but one can see that by adding the standard Latin agent noun suffix ("-or") to the verb yields "commentor".
Please note that the Latin verb commentārī had a much broader meaning. It can be used as any of the followings: "to consider thoroughly [thoughts]", "to prepare [exposé]"; "to invent", "to compose", "to write [literary works]".
For instance, "commentarius" has the meaning of "memorandum , notebook". Remember for instance the original Latin title "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" of Julius Caesar's ("Commentaries on the Gallic War"): these are actually not comments but a notebook, a relation (a title designed to be neutral but with an agenda as is well known).
I'm not too sure why Medieval Latin "commentator" came to supplement Classical Latin "commentor" but I speculate that this is related to the gradual loss of meaning as "to invent" and to the consequent specialisation as "to expound" in which case "commentator" would be formed after "commentarius" the noun (this Julian "Commentarii" really looked like comments).
So we have "commentary" and "comment" (just as we have documentary and document).
Looking up both words in the Century Dictionary shows the nuance:
- A commentator "makes comments or critical or expository notes upon a book or other writing".
- A commenter "makes remarks about actions, opinions, etc.".
There's a whiff of scholarship in the commentator that is absent from the mere commenter.
I don't deny that musicality or morphological consistency have a role to play in our vocabulary. However, and this is particularly true of English, I would argue that when several words with close signification are in competition, they tend to specialise and contribute to the language's richness.
In that particular case the reason why we might be more attracted to the variant "commentator" is possibly because of its perceived higher quality standard.
Nevertheless, the word "commenter", having a long history of its own also has its dedicated niche where it is preferably used.
A significant proportion of the COCA corpus entries I found had "commenter" associated with "anonymous" or "typical": sounds better than "anonymous commentator" this time.
Best Answer
In the autumn of 1719, after his wife's death, the wealthy Virginia planter William Byrd II visited London, maintaining the diary he had begun years ago back in the Colonies. He dutifully noted the Greek and Hebrew passages he had read every morning, various meals and social engagements — and his numerous sexual encounters, recording each time the number of orgasms:
Byrd was, by his own account, a very busy man.
To describe these sexual encounters, he uses the verb to roger: Byrd is, of course, the subject; the direct object is the female object of his momentary affection. This is the simple SVO construction you see lacking in Modern English.
Now what D.H. Lawrence called John Thomas in Lady Chatterley's Lover had been called Roger since the sixteenth century, but the verb, still somewhat current in British use, was still new when Byrd rogered his way across London.
Byrd was alone when he wrote his diary, but one can imagine the social context in which he both learned and used the word: with intimate male friends such as Lord Orrery as they reminisced over their sexual conquests.
I would submit that any SVO contruction which depicts the male as active conquering subject and the woman as vanquished direct object arises in just such homosocial contexts and usually stays there: "locker room talk."
Thus the level of taboo or perceived vulgarity when they subject their female objects to their attention is solely up to the men conversing.
In other contexts where it might be permissible to speak of sexual matters, a more mutual expression is far more likely.