باشَرَ (bāšara) v.: to have sex with, lit. to be in contact with each other, skin to skin

Terms for sex abound, but few of them — whether formal or vulgar — suggest a meaning as rawly sensual and as tender as bāšara.

With a root that signifies skin (بَشَرة / bašarah) and the flesh, bāšara implies contact and mutual touch.

This is seen not only in sexual contexts, but in functionary matters too. As the English dictionary compiler Lane puts it, one may take a matter into “his own hand” (باشَرَ الأمرَ / bāšara al-ʾamr).[1]

Lane, however, was a Victorian prude, and his Lexicon hides the most luscious sense of bāšara behind the fig leaf of untranslated Arabic and his own obscurantist Latin (e.g. congressus venereus). Yet even then he fails to blot out its full sensuousness. He cites classical sources:

“… both being within one garment or piece of cloth… he lay with her … skin to skin.”

* * *

Today, bāšara appears today to have shed its most evocative meanings and instead does dry service in governmental and corporate contexts. An alternate derivation of the same triliteral root sees bāšara relegated to use welcoming the formation of bureaucratic committees or the adoption by national airlines of new models of aircraft.[2]

One bemoans not so much the loss of linguistic imagination, as an impoverished reckoning of sex and sensuality. 

[1] Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, reprint (Beirut, 1968), I: 207

[2]“Maqar ‘Al-Murābiṭūn’ kan al-ʾaūwal. Izālat ʾabnīyah fī Bairūt tuhadad as-salāmah wa al-ʾaṯārīyah,” via ArabiCorpus, reference: NEW1997:28530 (Arabic).