Make Love, Not War

Posted by ESC on March 15, 2009 at 21:50

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR - A writer browsing in a Maine used bookstore came across "Rationale of the Dirty Joke" by G. Legman. Later, in 1999, he saw an obituary for Gershon Legman (1917-1999) in the New York Times. Legman was called "'a self-taught scholar of dirty jokes,' (who) had died at the age of eighty-one, in the South of France, where he lived in voluntary exile from his native United States." He was credited with inventing the vibrating dildo, introducing origami to the West and coining the phrase "Make Love, Not War." Mr. Legman said he coined the phrase in a lecture at Ohio University in 1963. From "Stop Me If You've Heard This - A History and Philosophy of Jokes" by Jim Holt (W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London, 2008) Page 3, 30-31. A reference says coinage "has been attributed to Gershon Legman, a sexologist who is credited with first using the phrase 'Make Love, Not War,' during a speech in 1963. Others, however, claim that the German political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who lived in the USA from 1934, actually coined the phrase." From "The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases" compiled by Anna Farkas (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2002). Page 214.