Internet Dads: On Having "The Talk" In The Digital Age

The birds and the bees and...the Internet.

No one knows for sure where the phrase "the birds and the bees" came from, or when exactly it became the foremost euphemism for the sex talk. (There are theories.) Consensus, though, dates the phrase to February 21, 1825, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed his famous poem Work Without Hope. An excerpt:

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

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