Well, there's Greek , French kissing , flagellation "le vice anglais , Russian "Russian : Simulated intercourse with the penis between the woman's breasts"

djh5: Wow! I knew about Greek and French, but the English and Russian examples are news to me. Further evidence, I think, of how these terms often remain long after the animosities or scandals that created them are forgotten.

But the one I had in mind is even odder, I think, especially since the term is quite familiar, and most people probably don't even recognize the ethnic link.

Visitor Again: That's not a sexual practice as such.

Another not "a sexual practice as such" but related, the legendary cantharide "Spanish fly." And how about Canadian...oh too vile even to allude to.

[BTW, EV, what scholarly issue prompted this question?]

Probably not correct, but my 1993 Chambers Dictionary lists "soixante-neuf" for the 69 position.

In medieval letters I've encountered anal sex referred to as "the Italian vice" or "after the Italian manner." The Italians, of course, called it after some other nationality, but I forget which one.

In one of his innumerable footnotes to the 16 volume 'Thousand and One Nights', Richard Burton alludes to the 'Albanian'. This is a form of autoerotic behavior in which the male member (euphemism for the filter's sake) is clamped between the guy's own ankles. Rocking back and forth is involved. Afraid I can't give the citation or, for that matter, whether it was an English or Latin footnote.

There are the obvious "sodomy" and "lesbianism" but I don't think that Sodom or Lesbos were large enough political units to qualify as "nationalities."

I would guess that Prof. Volokh is thinking of "bugger" (cognate with Bulgarian). Incidentally, when I was a teenager, "frenching" was a perfectly respectable verb (or participle), although "French kissing" may be slightly more standard English.

No links or cites, certainly not for the second point, which is based on my perspective as a native speaker.

Harking back a week or so, "Lesbian" was once a nationality, though I guess it isn't now.

"Bugger" seems to be the winner (others -- I was going to say "beat me to it" but maybe in a thread of double entendre's that's a bad phraseology):

Link

There are the obvious "sodomy" and "lesbianism" but I don't think that Sodom or Lesbos were large enough political units to qualify as "nationalities."

Doesn't "ethnicities" extend the possibilities beyond "nationalities"? And what about those sexual practices said by outsiders or detractors to characterize a particular group and locale (e.g., girls from a certain city in Italy, or sailors going to sea from Barranquilla, Colombia), which are most unlikely to be found in any dictionary, even a slang one, or other authoritative source, but which would be affirmed by those familiar with the area. (In Colombia, people carry the stereotype of the region from which they come, some flattering, e.g., the most beautiful Colombian women are supposedly those of Cali, some not so flattering, e.g., the friendly people of Pasto made the butt of many jokes.)

Is this contest over? Did it end, appropriately enough, with "to bugger"? (That is Bulgarian in derivation?! EV, we know that your interests are notably catholic, but where and how pray tell did you acquire this knowledge?)

NPR broadcasts a program The World, which regularly throws out geographical puzzlers, then gives the answers later in the program. Does anyone think they would be interested in the above as possible Q&As, "what country is known for this particular sexual practice (fill in the practice, describing it in suitably clinical terms, and there is always one, no matter how bizarre the practice)."

How nice that this isn't another narrowly focused, boring legal blog. But then the law does encompass much, doesn't it.

"Omanism," a practice said to have originated in Oman, held to be an abomination by the ancient Hebrews (the Bible), but viewed more understandingly by the modern ones (Portnoy's Complaint).

Heh.

Getting farther afield, if you type in practically any ethnicity or nationality in the search window of the "Urban Dictionary" you'll find some sort of sexual reference:

eg: Brazilian

Danish (see definition 3)

Australian (see definition 9)

ad infinitum et ad nauseum

neurodoc:

I like your idea for a new geography quiz for "The World." I can hear that music playing in the background, along with the host, saying "Have you guessed it yet? It's Bulgaria...."

"host, saying"

Woops, got an extra comma in there. The host wouldn't be playing in the background, nor would the music be "saying."

Michelle Dulak Thompson, wm13: You got it. Who'd have thunk it?

Little Loca: After Walt Whitman: "Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. Of the same thing." And note that it took a bunch of comments to get the answer; as I had imagined, people had forgotten (or the readership had largely turned over since then).

The Persian Positian.

This refers to the Iranian (and indeed, with all due respect, most Arab) males' proclivities toward buggery.

I'm told that this has been popular for millenia, particularly amongst the merchant class who, in league with like-minded religious figures, ousted the self-described King of Kings.

Without being too graphic, which oriface is most offensive in the desert when there is no water available?

How about Arabian Goggles
http://www.stickykeys.org/dict1/index.html
Link is definitely not safe for work, but it is amusing.

"If you wish to read
of each foul misdeed
...

Disallowed!

If limericks were to be recognized here, the challenge would have to be to name "an ethnicity or nationality that has never been maliciously linked with a singular sexual practice." In The Limerick, edited by G. Legman (1964, Bell Publishing Co, New York), on almost every page there are ones by "anonymous" that relate to sexual variation in almost every place on earth. Aix, Antigua, Australia, Bagdad [sic], Bangkok, Benares, Bengal, Bombay, the Bronx, Calcutta...and on and on. Havana, perhaps deservedly (pre-Castro), was the subject of three. Nothing about Oman, but Legman did include a ditty about an "eccentric from Mecca" and a "young girl from Medina" who did things with their private parts that are beyond the scope of even this intellectually far-ranging blog. (Aden, Algiers, Iraq, Beirut, Tobruk, Turkey...)

Hmmm, have women contributed anything to this thread? Is it an entirely "guy" thing?

(Oh, I failed to mention that Legman had only 2 for Texas, but 7(!) for Dallas, including one about "a team playing baseball in Dallas," which if it did not trace to 1946 might have been about George W.'s Texas Rangers.)

For what it's worth, my shorter OED says the roots of "buggery" are "buggarie" (Middle Dutch) and "bougrerie" (Old Fremch). No reference to any places, though I don't speak Middle Dutch or Old French and perhaps those words refer in some way to places.

While we're at it, here's one definition from the OED entry on the noun "bugger":

One who commits buggery; a sodomite. In decent use only as a legal term.

Somehow I just found the "In decent use only as a legal term" to be funny (not to say mistaken, just funny).

neurodoc asks whether women have contributed at all to this thread. The first winner is named 'Michelle', so the answer is that at least one has contributed more usefully than any of the men. Maybe two, since wm13's gender is quite opaque.

On the other hand, two women have also contributed the only worse than useless comments to this thread. Apparently the bell curve for women is wider than that for men when it comes to sexual-ethnic etymologies and related humor. Of course, I may be wrong in assuming that Little Loca and Revonna LaSchatze are not men impersonating women. Not much chance of that in the second case, given the grotesque ignorance revealed in the first sentence, and the irony that her comment is filthier than any of the others so far.

Oops, not perjorative, although widely disdained, no doubt.

I always thought that the "Greek vice" was any sort of same sex coupling.

I don't know how Eugene found the Bulgarian connection, but I deduced it from the footnotes in my copy of Candide, for a college class long ago. Voltaire had been expelled from Frederick the Great's court for implying that this Prussian king sodomized boys. So once safe in Paris, he doubled the insult. In the story, he introduced the "Bulgarian" army, which was clearly a pseudonym for Prussian - a private couldn't actually become an officer in any other army merely by demonstrating that he knew the Prussian arms drill, but their organization and drill was almost that admired by the rest of the world. According to the footnotes, "Bulgarian" was 18th Century French slang for "pervert", after some immigrant to France that had managed to shock even Parisian sophisticates - and this army raped boys.

Finally, since the French word Voltaire used for "Bulgarian" must have been pronounced very much like "bugger", I deduce that it must be the source of the English word. It may have been passed through Dutch or other languages to reach English, but I'm sure plenty of English gentlemen also read Voltaire in French, and some spent enough time in Paris to learn the slang meaning, if they didn't learn it from the book. So I can't prove that this was the source, but it would be a heck of a coincidence if it isn't.

EV: It's not the repetition, in and of itself, but rather your seeming obsession with the term "bugger." I find it humorous, especially considering its VERY infrequent usage in American English (i.e., your dialect of choice). Indeed, I dare say I have NEVER heard that word used in my life by an American; even in law school, it was in British cases that it came up, if I'm not mistaken.

My, GG, Greeks must need very large bumpers to have such a motto.

Neurodoc, you did mean small-c "catholic" as in "universal," right? I don't think EV is Catholic!

But as for your juxtaposition of the c-word and buggery . . .

Is this contest over? Did it end, appropriately enough, with "to bugger"? (That is Bulgarian in derivation?! EV, we know that your interests are notably catholic, . . .

Little Loca: Sorry to learn of your learning disadvantage. I've been hearing and using 'bugger' since I was 10. I was living in New England, so perhaps that had something to do with it. When first learned, it was just a deprecation, without the (then unknown) sexual content. My hometown, though, was mostly Irish, not British.

Little Loca: Well, you can find obsessions where you please, including in very rare posts on the subject. But it strikes me as quite amusing that something that seems like a quintessential Britishism actually stems from a centuries-old religious and ethnics prejudice against an obscure sect in, of all places, Bulgaria. I suspect that many people who are fascinated by words -- even obsessed with them (I mean words generally, not "bugger" in particular) would find this equally interesting, for this very reason.

Bpbatista:

(1) "its" motto, not "it's" motto.

(2) your Roman ancestors (though I doubt you had any) were getting pretty frisky, too, in those "baths" of theirs. So, your army joke is one of those "one finger pointing at me, four fingers pointing back at you" scnearios.

(3) you grossly misunderstand history. The Roman Empire's dominance of Greece ended rather quickly (as did the entire empire) and the Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine or Greco-Roman, really Greek, Empire) went on to thrive. So, even copying our technology and relying on our scientists for technological progress, you STILL couldn't evolve. It's sad. :-( I guess imitation isn't what it's cracked up to be.

I first saw the term buggery in my Bar-Bri book in the criminal law section. There was very little else amusing in that book.

snark, yes, definitely small-c. Seemed like an apt characterization of the breadth of EV's topical interests. The only intended witticism was the observation about how appropriate it would be for the thread to "end" after "to bugger." I do see, though, how you might have thought more was intended given the approximation of the c-word and "to bugger." Because the archdiocese where UCLA is located has finally settled the last of those abuse cases, I do think we should put all this behind us (no, no punning).

I'm surprised you didn't note that your comment was #69, Pale Jewel.

Dr Weevil - I in fact noticed, but only after I had clicked "post comment", alas. It seemed that to follow the comment with another would undermine the joke somewhat, so I am glad you noticed!