Nothing seems quite as colorful as British slang terms for having sex. Shag is one we all know and love, and it’s older than you might think.

While we closely associate shag with the British—to the point of parody even, as in Mike Myers’s 1999 comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me—one of the earliest records of shag for “have sex with” comes from someone we think of as all-American: Thomas Jefferson. Yes, that Thomas Jefferson.Shag is likely related to shake. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the connection there. The noun form, as in having a shag, dates to at least the 1930s, as does its more forceful, interjection form: Shag off!