play doctor
English
Noun
play doctor (plural play doctors)
- A professional who is called in to revise a play written by someone else.
- 1912 July 19, The Evening Telegram, Elyria, Ohio:
- If Shakespeare lived to-day he would have waited four years to have his first comedy read and accepted—after which it would have been re-written by the stage carpenter and the leading lady and put on with interpolated songs and a costume chorus with a play doctor in the rear of the theater keeping track of the laughs with a hand comptometer.
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Verb
play doctor (third-person singular simple present plays doctor, present participle playing doctor, simple past and past participle played doctor)
- To pretend to be doctor and patient as a form of child play.
- (sexuality, usually of minors) To explore or sexually engage with the another person's genitals or anus, particularly in the context of roleplay of a medical nature.
- 1931 October, R. L. Whitely, “Interviewing the Problem Boy”, in E. George Payne, editor, The Journal of Educational Sociology, volume V, number 2, Albany, page 99:
- […] Jimmie volunteered, […] "How can you have kids if you don't play doctor?"
- 1988, Lynn Leight, Rasing Sexually Healthy Children, New York: Avon Books, published 1990, →ISBN, page 226:
- By the time they are six, they may play doctor and take one another's rectal temperature or place objects into their orifices, […]
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Translations
to engage in sexual role-play of a medical nature
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References
- “play-doctor, n.” under “play, n.”, in OED Online
, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2021.