The French question, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" (Would
you like to sleep with me tonight?) is extremely well-known in
English.  How did this get started?  Note that the answer is NOT the
song "Lady Marmelade" as performed by various artists from the 1970s
to the present.  This phrase appears in Tennessee Williams's 1947
play, "A Streetcar Named Desire," in more or less its current usage,
and I am confident that its use does not originate in Streetcar.  So
the question is, What is the original history of this snippet of
French in the English-speaking world?

---

Request for Question Clarification by juggler-ga on 29 May 2004 01:17 PDT

Considering the centuries of close contact between the English and
French, it's difficult if not impossible to identify the "original
history" of when any French phrase was first used by English speakers.

As such, I assume that you're simply interested in early uses of the
phrase in the "popular culture." I've located a reference to the
phrase appearing in a song performed in a popular 1920s musical
written by a famous songwriter.  Would you be interested in this?

---

Clarification of Question by tcblum-ga on 29 May 2004 11:00 PDT

The question is when it first entered popular discourse in the
English-speaking world.  If this thing in the 1920s is indeed its
first entrance into pop discourse, then I am interested.  If you're
only guessing that it's the first entrance into pop discourse, then I
am not interested.

I feel confident that there are academics who know the answer to my
question definitively.  I assume that the best way to answer this
question is going to be to find a site that explicitly discusses the
history of this phrase in English, not to attempt, yourself, to trace
that history.

---

Request for Question Clarification by juggler-ga on 29 May 2004 12:13 PDT

You wrote, " If you're only guessing that it's the first entrance into
pop discourse..."

Actually, I wouldn't even have gone that far.  I was merely offering a
pop culture reference 20 years older than "Streetcar."  I do not claim
it to be the "first entrance into pop discourse."  As such, I can tell
that my information will not meet your needs.

I hope that another researcher will be able locate the sort of
definitive academic sources that you seek.  Good luck!

For many years I have been puzzled by something related to this
phrase. If a person is asking another person an intimate question of
this sort, why would the request use the formal "vous" rather than the
familiar "tu?"

"Veux-tu coucher avec moi ce soir?" seems more natural to me. If you
know somebody well enough to invite them to bed down, don't you know
them well enough to dispense with the formal language?

If you know them that well, you might not have to make such a formal
inquiry.  It might be most useful between strangers . . .

Tryx

So, the non-formal way would be "Je t'aime... moi non plus", right?

I've thought about this and I'm convinced that the phrase is ironic in
one or both of the following two ways:

1) It's bad French, i.e., it IS the wrong type of address because it's
American French -- it's the way someone who doesn't really know French
would ask the question.

2) It has to do with a situation involving relatively anonymous sex,
e.g., in a prostitution situation.  The lady therefore doesn't know
the man well enough to address him as "tu," but the irony is that she
is proposing such an intimate encounter with someone she doesn't even
know well enough to say "tu" to.

Obviously, knowing the history of this phrase would help us sort out the reason.

Why would you say "Je t'aime... moi non plus"?  I think the most
idiomatic way to ask this question would be something like, "Tu
couches avec moi ce soir?" -- "Are you sleeping with me tonight?"  Or,
to mean something slightly different, more of a real question rather
than an assumption, "Est-ce que tu coucherais avec moi ce soir?" --
"Would you sleep with me tonight?"  Of course, the real way to say it
is "Baise-moi."

Isn't "baises-moi" sort of vulgar?  As in "f**k me"?

yes, it's entirely vulgar, but I was trying to make the point that in
human discourse this question is rarely posed in parlor-room language.

" 2) It has to do with a situation involving relatively anonymous sex,
e.g., in a prostitution situation. "

You might like to see this poem (1922?) by E.E.Cummings:
http://membres.lycos.fr/toto_zero/Cummings.html

thank you -- that is totally relevant and quite possibly the correct answer.