Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of “osculation,” but it could be ignorance on my part.
A: “Osculation” is being used here to mean “kissing,” the original sense of the English noun and its Latin ancestor. However, the noun is now used humorously in its kissing sense, or used as a mathematical term for the point at which a pair of curves or surfaces touch.
The evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne, a religious skeptic, is using “osculation” satirically on his website Why Evolution Is True to say The New York Times and The Free Press are kissing up to religion by taking it seriously.
English borrowed the noun “osculation” and the verb “osculate” from Latin in the mid-17th century. Both terms ultimately come from osculum, Latin for a “kiss” (literally, a “little mouth,” the diminutive of os, or “mouth”).
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “osculation” as “the action of kissing; a kiss.” The earliest OED citation is from The New World of English Words (1658), by Edward Phillips: “Osculation, a kissing or imbracing.” Phillips was a nephew of Milton and educated by him.
As for the verb, the OED defines it as “to kiss (a person or thing), to salute with contact of the lips.” It labels the usage “now archaic or humorous.” The dictionary’s first example is from a dictionary of difficult words:
“Osculate, to kiss, to love heartily, to imbrace.” (From Glossographia: or, a Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue, 1665, by the antiquary and lexicographer Thomas Blount.)
As for the mathematics sense, the OED says the verb appeared first in the 18th century and meant “to touch (another curve or surface) so as to have a common tangent at the point of contact.”
The first citation is from Cyclopædia; or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), by Ephraim Chambers:
“Circle described on the Point C, as a Centre … with the Radius of the Evolute M C, is said to osculate, kiss, the Curve described by Evolution in M; which Point M is call’d by the Inventor [Christiaan] Huygens, the Osculum of the Curve.”
The math sense of the noun appeared in the 19th century. The OED says the noun here refers to “contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from An Elementary Treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus (1816), an English translation of Traité Élémentaire du Calcul Différentiel et du Calcul Intégral (1802), by the French mathematician Silvestre François Lacroix:
“The contact of the highest order which can take place between the tangent curve, and the one proposed, depends on the number of constants which the equation of the former involves, and is also called the contact of osculation.”
Getting back to the original kissing sense, the OED has this 20th-century example of “osculating” from Don’t Tread on Me: the Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman (1987), edited by Prudence Crowther:
“When I asked him once why his hands were so cold he said, ‘They’ve been insufficiently osculated’ ” (from Crowther’s introduction).
Finally, in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, a small toast to the original sense of “osculation”—the opening lines of “As Time Goes By”:
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh;
The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by.
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