love bites

[constant_muse]

Language advice please.
If an American talking about seduction refers to a 'love bite' what do they mean? The context I have suggests a playful or sensual nip. But in UK and Australia a ' love bite' is a horrid bruise inflicted by adolescents on each other while petting.
This relates to my work believe it or not!

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Comments

[byslantedlight]

Love bites aren't horrid! Surely!

But yeah - I've always thought a UK/Aus "lovebite" was an American "hickey", so whether they use "love bite" too, or for something else... I never heard it used when I was there, but it'll be interesting to find out! Ha, in fact google redirects to hickey, which I've always thought is a horrible term for it...

[constant_muse]

Thanks!
I knocked off the post on my phone in haste, but the context of the 'love bite' was meeting a girl for the first time, flirting and trying to establish a rapport - so I really don't think love bite in the 'hickey' sense was what the author had in mind.

[sc_fossil]

Generally a love bit is a hickey, where the skin is sucked to raise blood into a bruise. We use either one.

[constant_muse]

ah, thank you!! 'Hickey' was used in Australia too, but only as teenage-speak, 'love bite' was more the conventional term.

The author is not a native English speaker, and while he has got American idiom very authentically (at least, as I know it from the media), I was worried that this was one colloquialism he had missed. As in my comment above, the context definitely did not mean sucking the skin that hard!

[squeeful]

Either or both. It can be a bruise/hickey and it can be nipping in a sensual or erotic context. A love bite can leave a love bite.

[constant_muse]

good point - love bite is both the action and the effect of it.
Thanks!