Sexual activity has a long and creative history of being described and referred to by slang and euphemism. But when the source domain of the euphemism--the "literal" meaning--is an equally ordinary everyday action, the ambiguity creates problems of interpretation. And in a field like the study of historic same-sex relations, where there is a long tradition of going to some contortions to deny even the scraps of available evidence, euphemism has long been interpreted selectively depending on the genders of the participants. "They weren't, you know, sleeping together, they were just sleeping together."
This article examines one of those euphemisms in a context where both the wider use of the phrase and supporting evidence from the text argues for an unambiguously sexual interpretation. (The article also gives me a new historic text to try to track down.)
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