- (the )sport
- copulationSometimes viewed as such by the male: He had some feeling for the sport; he knew the service. (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure — his vulgar puns did not refer to battledore and shuttlecock)In literary use you will run across amorous sport, sport for Jove, and so on.To sport has long meant to copulate:Now let us sport us while we may. (Marvell, c.l 670)although in modern use it usually refers to prostitution, as in sport-trap, a brothel area of a town:Storyville became and stayed the biggest tourist and sport-trap in the nation. (Longstreet, 1956 — and so remained until 1917, when it was shut down to protect American servicemen from temptation and disease)or in sporting section, which puns on the part of the newspaper given over to reporting ball games etc.:You came to the sporting section, the cathouses around 22nd street, (ibid.)and a sporting-house is a brothel:She was like a lot of sporting-house landladies I've known through life. (L. Armstrong, 1955)There you may find sporting girls or women, whose athleticism is concentrated in the boudoir rather than on the playing field.However in a sports bar you may not find anything more titillating than a topless waitress:If nothing else it means the topless waitress in your local sports bar can now double as a salad-dressing dispenser. (Mark Stein in Daily Telegraph, 5 December 1998 — reporting on soya-oil breast implants)
How not to say what you mean: A dictionary of euphemisms. R. W. Holder. 2014.