The use of the term "exotic dancer" in a report of an accusation made against members of the Duke University lacrosse team has riled a Times reader. George Grumbach of New York notes that his dictionary defines exotic as "of foreign origin or character" and erotic as "of or pertaining to sexual love; amatory." He asks: "Is the use of exotic a euphemism to avoid overtly stating that the lacrosse team hired two dancers whose purpose was sexual titillation? If so, does it not amount to false reporting in the context of discussing how the hiring of these dancers ended with alleged sexual assault?"

The difference between the two adjectives is rooted in their Greek etymologies: exotic is from exo, "outside," though that meaning of "alien" has been extended to flavors or looks as "mysteriously different." Erotic, as Eros, god of sexual love, would tell you, can describe action at home.

The adjectival difference is the easy part: exotic is "strange, foreign," while erotic is "sexy." But when married to the noun dancer, the meanings of the phrases get tricky.



Thanks to a commercial database named the Newspaper Archive, I found a 1918 review in The Elyria Evening Telegram of Elyria, Ohio, of a silent movie starring a young woman from Spain known as "the famous Doralinda, a women of remarkable personality, who has achieved a noteworthy success as an exotic dancer in New York." That phrase did not then denote the removal of clothing. From the belly dance performed by a dancer who called herself Little Egypt at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, through the shimmying and semiviolent "apache dance" of the Jazz Age of the 1920's, to the colorful gyrations of Carmen Miranda with what seemed to be a fruit basket on her head in the early 1940's — the performers of such rhythmic writhing were often called exotic dancers.

... Meanwhile, in the 1930's, the striptease blossomed, and the "burlesque wars" broke out. The uptown set embraced the word follies, celebrating beautiful girls in costumes, while the "poor man's follies" downtown, in immigrant districts and in Harlem, embraced the bumping, grinding, take-it-off entertainment presented by impresarios of the strippers. On Oct. 10, 1942, the show-biz publication Billboard headlined an article "Strip, Strip Tease or Exotic Dancing, and the Difference." The difference was explained by an arrested bar owner in Bucks County, Pa., to a local judge: in a striptease, "the performer doesn't remove the veils that are her only adornment — but she lifts and swishes them around" while an exotic dance "has more strip than a striptease, and practically no tease at all." He was fined $400.

In her 2004 book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, Rachel Shteir quoted the famed striptease artist Georgia Sothern's letter to the columnist-semanticist H. L. Mencken: "I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession." He accommodated her with his coinage of ecdysiast, rooted in ecdysis, "the act of molting," which Gypsy Rose Lee dismissed with "We don't wear feathers and molt them off. . .what does he know about stripping?"

"In Philadelphia the word exotic described performers who abandoned bumps and grinds for slinking across the stage in a tiny costume," Shteir wrote, which was "partly motivated by local censors' attacks on striptease and burlesque, but I like to think they also revealed the genre's variety." Although Ms. Shteir cited Billboard's contrary differentiation noted above, she recently informed me that "exotic dance sounded classier than striptease because it did not suggest the removal of clothing to music. It suggested undulating in Middle Eastern or Latin American garb."

The philologist Allan Orrick of Johns Hopkins University addressed the question that we deal with today in the October 1956 issue of American Speech. Reviewing peeler, burlesque queen and stripteaser (compressed to one word), as well as news coverage of the League of Exotic Dancers, he concluded that "the word exotic is used not as a euphemism for stripper but to distinguish exotics from dancers such as 'acrobatics' and from other kinds of striptease dancers. 'Exotics' may be referred to as 'strippers,' but all strippers are not exotics. In other words, stripper seems to be a generic term while exotic denotes a subtype . . .the two words are not synonyms, and one can hardly be a euphemism for another."

That scholarly analysis is a half-century old. Usage has changed the meaning of exotic dancer, erasing such subtypes as belly dancing and acrobatics. There never was a category widely called erotic dancer; that phrase emerged only later as an attempted correction of exotic dancer, but the original phrase subsumed the meaning of the correction and outnumbers it in current usage by more than 40 to 1. In 50 years, the meaning of exotic dancer has merged with stripper as performers using both phrases leave little or nothing to the imagination.

It is still a mistake to confuse the adjective erotic (maddeningly sexy) with exotic (mysteriously foreign). But the phrase exotic dancer — which preceded stripteaser and became for a time a euphemism for it — has for longer than a generation made the usage leap to become synonymous with stripper and the more recent nude dancer.

Therefore, this language maven deems it no mistake to adopt common usage of the phrase exotic dancer to mean "one who strips off clothing to arouse sexual desire by displaying the naked body in motion."