This is not a word that most people are happy to hear.  It tends to be used with disapproval.

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Well, it used to be used with disapproval.

These days I guess it’s being used all too often with the hope of attracting an audience.

I see a news story about a teacher sending salacious messages to a student.  That’s definitely disapproved of!

A Broadway show where actresses take off all their clothes is promoted as salacious.  That doesn’t sound like disapproval to me.

Here’s one, Tom Hanks; the disapproval here is that there are no salacious stories about him. The reporter is disappointed to report that they can’t report any juicy scandal.

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary tells me that the meaning of the word salacious is “inciting to sexual desire or imagination” or “marked by lecherousness or lewdness.”

The word was first used in English in the latter 1600s and had been drawn directly from Latin by the high-flown scholars of the day.  Back in Latin the word had been salax with a root salire which in turn went back to an Indo-European root sel.

You can be sure that back in pre-history people were interested in sex, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.  But however they expressed themselves about it, it wasn’t by using the root sel.

Sel meant “jump” and shows up in some of our other English words such as assault and somersault.

Similarly the Latin word salire meant “jump” or “leap.”

But for those people who had little self control and who liked to jump on women Latin evolved the new word salax.

So quite literally something that is salacious is something that makes people want to jump their partner.

In an effort to improve the self control of those few of my listeners and readers who might need it, I return to the first English citation for the word salacious.  This was by an author named Owen Felltham or Feltham.

His big literary hit in the century after Shakespeare was something called Resolves.

It was a book meant to improve your morals by telling 100 little stories and ending each one with a resolve that he hoped his readers would adopt.

His use of the word salacious here might be understandable.

But in fact he isn’t talking about his fellow countrymen and the birds and the bees.  Instead he’s talking about the birds themselves.

He accuses the sparrow of being salacious.

Now over the last few decades the population of sparrows in the United Kingdom has ranged from 6 to 12 million individuals.  The population of people in England is 61 million.  That’s five to ten times as many people as there are sparrows.

I ask you, which species is more jumpy?