14 October 2020
A French kiss is a deep, open mouth kiss that uses the tongue as well as the lips. The term dates to the early twentieth century, and the earliest known use of the term is by a U.S. soldier in France during World War I—but we cannot say that the term was invented during that war. It likely predates the war in oral use.
On 30 December 1918, Private Clarance Lindner wrote home to his family:
So I have decided to become a linguist. Being able to read French fluently and speak it wretchedly, and to speak German connectively but not to read it at all, I am taking up Luxembourg, which is a wonderful blend of the two, a sort of laison [sic] between tongues. (Not to be confused with French kissing.)
The OED has an 1858 citation for French kissing, but this is a reference to the practice of greeting someone by kissing them on both cheeks, not a tongue kiss.
It’s possible that Lindner’s parenthetical reference to French kissing is a later editorial intervention. Lindner’s letters were collected and privately published by his family in 1939. We do not have the originals. Questions of accuracy and originality are generally an issue with collections of letters and papers that have been published by interested parties. Scholarly collections are more likely to scrupulous in noting where they make editorial interventions.
But we get a fuller description of French kissing a few years later in Elliot Paul’s 1922 Indelible, so the 1918 date isn’t far off in any case:
When it was real dark we began kissing each other. We stayed there quite a while, and I hugged her as best I could, although I remembered afterwards what the book said about not doing it, so you could look your wife in the face.
She showed me the French kiss where you stick your tongue out, but I did n’t [sic] like it. Ethel was as restless as could be, and all of a sudden she burst out crying. She said nothing was the matter, and as soon as she quieted down, I went home, as it was late.
We suspect the term is older than these recorded citations because the adjective French has a long history of association with things sexual. This association dates to the Restoration of the seventeenth century, as found in an anonymous satirical poem from 1682 that describes the sexual proclivities of various women in the English court:
Vernon, to say the truth’s a bouncing wench,
She swears and fucks and all the while’s so French!
There you have it, from the court of Charles II to American soldiers in WWI.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, French kiss, n.
Lindner, Clarence R., Private Lindner’s Letters, edited by Gladys Dudley Lindner (San Francisco, 1939), 119.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. French kiss, n., French kiss, v., French, adj. and n.
Paul, Elliot H. Indelible. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922, 60–61. HathiTrust Digital Library.
“Satire ((April,) 1682).” Court Satires of the Restoration. John Harold Wilson, ed.. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976, 82. HathiTrust Digital Library.