ed. note: this installment, dedicated to my diminishing tracks of land, comes courtesy of Mark Morton's The Lover's Tongue (2003), a book that has supplied many a fine euphemism in my stories. And which, if I remember correctly, was purchased for the princely sum of $1 from a Xtian book store. Without further ado...
Bosom.
Denotes the breast of a human, male or female, not the breasts of a woman; a man for example, can hold a child to his bosom. This is good for Thomas Jefferson, who otherwise might have been arrested for saying,
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
For centuries the phrase Abraham's bosom has denoted the heavenly place into which the souls of the righteous are gathered [ed. perhaps bringing further elucidation to the lyrical musing of Cornershop's everyone needs a bosom for a pillow].
It has been used since the early twentieth century to denote a woman's breasts. James Bond, for example, gets "a quick glimpse of fine bosoms" in 1965's The Man with the Golden Gun. This use of bosoms is undoubtedly the source of the slang term bazooms, which emerged in the 1920s.
Morton goes on to quote the Good Book: 'bazumbas begat bazongas, which begat gazongas, which begat kazongas, which began kajoobies, which begat jaboos' [ed. Possibly Revelations? Perhaps a rereading is in order...]
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