Sotadic Zone

English

Etymology

Coined by British explorer, army officer, writer and scholar Richard Francis Burton in 1886.

Proper noun

the Sotadic Zone

  1. (now historical) A region of the world, approximately defined as a strip of Afroeurasia from the Mediterranean region eastward as well as the entirety of the Americas, in which male homosexuality was supposed to be societally prevalent.
    • 1894, Richard Francis Burton, “Terminal Essay”, in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, volume X, London: H.S. Nichols & Co.:
      Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.