lucylou.livejournal.comNot sure if you guys knew this, but I just found out and it made my whole day!
Alright. I was doing some research for certain, ahem, scenes in my upcoming fic, and in doing so, was reading a specific chapter of "Fanny Hill," in which she secretly watches two men having sex. It lent the proper cadence and subtlety I'm looking for. Anyway, so I'm reading, and in the midst of a sentence comes this passage:
"the Ganymede now obsequiously leaned his head against the back of it, and projecting his body, made a fair mark, still covered with his shirt,"
Now, knowing, as I do, that Jeeve's club of upscale servingpeople is known as the "Junior Ganymede club," I thought I must be mistaken, but I looked it up and found this on the wodehouse site:
"Jeeves' club is the Ganymede, whose equally exclusive membership is composed of butlers, valets, gentlemen's gentlemen, and other in the upper reached of London's servant class.... Ganymede, in classic mythology, is the cup-bearer to the gods. "
Intrigued, I looked up the definition of Ganymede, and discovered that in Greek mythology, Ganymede wasn't originally the "cup-bearer," but the boy-lover of Zeus, and in common terms, it refers to (usually the younger) of a pair of male lovers.
Seriously. I didn't make this up. Wodehouse did.
That man's secretive brilliance blows me away regularly.