{"id":13754,"date":"2011-06-30T15:10:13","date_gmt":"2011-06-30T19:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/30\/13754.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:59:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:59:59","slug":"one-night-only","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/30\/one-night-only\/","title":{"rendered":"One Night Only"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, there’s Your Humble Blogger reading about Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe<\/a>, via a bunch of links from one place to another to another, and I came across a quirk of English that I wanted to check with y’all.\n

Here’s the thing: what exactly is a one-night stand<\/i>?\n

One of the phrasings of the survey (not in the paper itself, but in discussion of its results and methodology) asked how many one-night stands have you had<\/i>, and YHB was unable to respond. Yes, partly because I am old, and my memory has gone, and I can no longer be sure whether the dim memory-like things in my skull are actual memories of things that happened in college or if that was actually something that happened to Andrew McCarthy and Jacqueline Bisset. But also because I discovered I am not sure what a one-night stand is.\n

Well, at least, I know something of it—if two people meet for the first time and have sex that night (or afternoon or whatever) and then part, never to meet again, that is clearly a one-night stand. That’s the canonical example, the no-question-about-it one-night stand. Fine. But the actual article (linked above) asks in its survey “With how many different partners have you had sex on one and only one occasion?” This got paraphrased, or translated I suppose, as how many one-night-stands. And these seem to be overlapping but different categories. What about sex with a hooker? I would never, in conversation, refer to that as a one-night-stand. And I know that many such incidents are not unrepeated combinations of participants, but surely many are. To me, the one-night-stand can’t be an entirely commercial matter.\n

On the other side, I wouldn’t have used the phrase to describe any of the myriad ways in which people with an ongoing social relationship have once-and-only-once: the room-mate’s girlfriend, the stockboy, the one-time-at-band-camp, any of those great and not always aprocryphal stories that abound in pornographic literature. And I’m not sure that other people would not include those in the category, or at least some of those. The drunken-party story, for instance, seems to fit the one-night-stand category, but what about the office-Xmas-party story? I don’t know.\n

In fact, I have become convinced that I don’t really know what a one-night stand<\/i> is. Do any of you?\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is trying to decide between zero and one, not that it’s any of your business. Unless it was you, in which case, was it or wasn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19378,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754\/revisions\/19378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}