Boing. An odd thought bouncing off my brain.
With one exception, we --English speakers, anyway-- use our own bodies as a source of metaphors for the rest of the world: the foot of the bed, an arm of the State, the eye of a needle, the mouth of a river, the belly of the beast, the leg of a journey, the butt of a joke. We anthropomorphize the earth with our own flesh.
But when it comes to the sexual organs, the process is reversed. Even the Latinate terms we use are metaphors in their original languages. Penis is tail; vagina is sheath. And the raft of names we have for our genitalia are metaphors taken from the very outside world that, in every other respect, we metaphorize by our bodies. Cock, prick, balls, nuts. Pussy, cunt. (And those words are almost always AngloSaxon in derivation rather than Latinate.) Almost as if our sexual parts have no name of their own.
All of which means....
1 comment:
"Almost as if our sexual parts have no name of their own."
When I was a tot, I solved this by inventing the word 'pee-er' for the important item -- basically Anglo-Saxon in form. Later in life, I always found the term 'peer' to be sort of embarassing/awkward. "Teenagers may experience a lot of peer pressure", e.g.
I read of a kid who decided that if the organ was called a 'penis' the more aftward aperture must be a 'poonis'.
--Nathan
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