I must quote you a fantastic bit from Pamela.
The eponymous heroine and fiancé Mr B are discussing how she will spend her time once they are married. She enumerates a long list of useful and improving activities, including family management, keeping accounts, visiting the unhappy poor in the neighbourhood, assisting the housekeeper in the manufacture of jellies, comfits, sweetmeats, marmalades and cordials, driving in Mr B’s chariot, listening to Mr B’s ‘instructive conversation’, entertaining ladies of quality, playing cards, music, reading, writing, and of course praying to God in thanks for ‘all the blessings I shall receive at the hands of Providence, by means of your generosity and condescension’. (I think Pamela would become slightly annoying after a while.)
Mr B points out that she has, in fact, omitted one important item from the list of duties expected of a newly married woman.
“What delight do you give me, my beloved Pamela, in this sweet foretaste of my happiness! I will now defy the saucy, busy censures of the world; and bid them know your excellence, and my happiness, before they, with unhallowed lips, presume to judge of my actions, and your merit! And let me tell you, my dearest girl, that I can add to your agreeable enumeration my hopes of a still more pleasing amusement for you, though it is what your bashful modesty would not permit you to hint at; and which I will now no further touch upon, lest it should seem, to your nicety, to detract from the present purity of my good intentions, than to say, I hope you will have, superadded to all these, such an employment, as will give me a view of perpetuating my happy prospects, and my family at the same time; of which I am almost the only one, in a direct line.”
Or as we would put it nowadays, in our coarse, modern fashion:
“Bonking.”
