by Ralph Keyes
On both sides of the Atlantic, some preferred tummy, tum-tum, breadbasket, or Little Mary when talking about their digestive organ. A half century after H. L. Mencken ruminated on stomachs, lexicographer James McDonald concluded that the English were “now fairly evenly divided between those who talk of tummies and find words like guts and belly offensive, and those who talk of guts and bellies and find words like tummy offensive.”
Of course, they could always refer vaguely to their midriff or midsection, as some do, or resort to quasimedical euphemisms such as abdomen. This term has sometimes been used for male genitals, particularly in the form lower abdomen. In his 1971 play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, David Rabe wrote of a wounded soldier who tells a companion that he’s been hit in “the abdominal and groin areas.” His companion responds, “Don’t you talk that shit to me. Abdominal and groin areas, that shit. It hit you in the stomach, man, like a ten-ton truck, and it hit you in the balls, blew ’em away.”
Mammary Glands
Mammary glands are another popular source of euphemism and have been for centuries. Even though teat was used freely in the King James Version of the Bible, that Anglo-Saxonism did not pass muster with Noah Webster. In Isaiah 32:12, Webster revised “They shall lament for the teats” to “They shall lament for the breasts.”
Breast was an acceptable substitute for “teat” in Webster’s time. Even the highly euphemistic Jane Austen used that term in her writing. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, direct reference to women’s breasts was considered too likely to bring them to mind. In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray portrayed two men considering the “frontal development” of curvy Becky Sharp. To fastidious speakers, what was previously known as a “breast-pin” now became a bosom-pin. Well into the twentieth century, BBC announcers could refer to “the breast” but not to “breasts.” On The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Tommy Smothers and Elaine May mocked this sensibility with a 1967 skit in which May’s line, “My pulse beats wildly in my breast whenever you’re near,” is bowdlerized by censors to “My pulse beats wildly in my wrist whenever you’re near.” CBS deleted that segment.
Alternatives to “breasts” included bust and bosoms (pluralizing bosom, which took in the mammary glands and some chest muscles as well). Charms became a rather cheery euphemism for breasts in early-nineteenth-century England, far more appealing than its predecessors dairies and milky ways. In time, equally vague but less appealing terms appeared, such as a pair or assets. Or physique or torso. (“Great torso she’s got!”) Here as elsewhere, an age-old strategy involves using the name of a respectable body part euphemistically for one that’s more suspect: lungs for “breasts,” kidneys for “testicles,” or feet for sex organs (a common biblical dodge). Employing a term that stands in for other ticklish body parts—equipment— busty actress Raquel Welch once commented that her childhood nickname of “Bird legs” gave way to Rocky, then Hot Rocks “after the equipment arrived.”
A multitude of nouns can refer to breasts so long as they are preceded by “pair,” “two,” or “set.” Movie critic Joe-Bob Briggs liked to talk of busty starlets who were cast in movies because of their “two enormous talents.” In George Pelecanos’s novel The Big Blowdown, a man says of actress Carole Landis that “she’s got this beautiful set of personalities.” Another character had previously said that Landis “has this set of tits on her like…” In common parlance, tit became a contraction of “teat” during the Middle Ages. Over time, this three-letter word grew taboo enough that proper speakers thought twice before using terms such as “tit-bit” or “titmouse.” Today, tits are back, along with boobs, as common conversational fare (among friends, anyway). A contemporary breast-cancer-awareness program is called “Save the Boobs.” On theboobblog, a big-breasted New Yorker writes of the “titiquette” she wishes men would observe when confronted with her chest. According to the Urban Dictionary, “Proper titiquette dictates that one does not look for longer than one full second.” Frustrated by the longer looks men continually gave her own ample breasts, a woman I know tried explaining to a male friend that “big boobs” like hers were nothing more than fatty tissue. “Men love b-i-i-g fatty tissues,” he responded.
As long as men and women alike are obsessed with them, mammary glands will challenge our vocabularies. Despite their increasing respectability, boobs and tits are still rather risqué terms, as are jugs, tatas, and cowabungas. Other than “breast” itself—a word that remains dodgy in some circumstances—what can we safely call this body part? When breasts are in the news, journalists must improvise. After a picture of Barack Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau caressing the chest of a life-size Hillary Clinton cutout circulated on the Internet, columnist Kathleen Parker was reduced to writing that Favreau had been figuratively “captured clutching the prospective secretary of state’s, um, pectoral area.”
Private Parts
Proper Victorian women went to great lengths to cover their entire anatomy below the chin. They took care not only to conceal but even to avoid looking at certain body parts. These women minded the counsel of German educator Johann Heinrich Campe who once referred to “secret parts of our bodies,” ones we should “not merely keep… secret from everyone but also from ourselves.” Parts of shame some called them. Should there be a need to mention such parts, euphemistic words did important camouflage duty.
Private parts is the most useful euphemism for this group as a whole and has been for centuries. A 1615 book of advice for housewives suggested that for “disease of the private parts,” one should “Take a great handful of orpines [an herb], and bruise them between your hands till they be like a salve, and then lay them upon a cloth and bind them to the fundament.” This book also included a recipe for a poultice to use when “any man have his privy parts burned.” In time, parts alone became sometime shorthand for “genitals.” More often, it is shortened to privates. Privities was a highfalutin’ version meant to sound somewhat scholarly.
Loins was good enough for the King James Bible, eventually giving way to the even more euphemistic crotch, groin, nether parts, down south, or down below. This reflects a sense that certain parts of the anatomy just below the waist are not ones to be proud of. The more clinical term “pudenda” is adapted from the Latin terms pudere, which means “to cause shame,” pudendum, “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” and pars pudenda, “shameful part.” Genitalia is another Latin term, one that transformed “genitals”—in use since the Middle Ages—into a word that sounds hygienic enough to be used by doctors and laymen alike without fear of sounding lewd.
Counseling children on what to call their genitalia poses a particular problem for parents who have boys and girls. Some just go with “penis” and “vagina.” Others consider those names too clinical and roll their own. One mom settled on twiggy for her daughter’s vagina, twaggy for her son’s penis. Another used lou la for her daughter, tink a link for her sons. Wee wee bum and widger were the respective euphemisms in one family, piggy and punky in a second, peggy and winkie in a third. Tossle and woodle are used by some Australian parents. Those who rely on winkie and boo-boo risk problems, however, since the latter is so often used as kid talk for wounds of various sorts.
Some euphemisms can refer both to male and female sex organs. Figs, for example—long considered an unusually erotic fruit—were used that way by Aristophanes in his poem “The Peace”:
Pick your figs,
May his be large and hard,
May hers be sweet.
In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare used the word “will” to refer alternately to male and female sex organs. Gear is a more recent euphemism for both genders’ genitalia. Thing can also be used bisexually, as can whachamacallit, and the ever-useful it. Anatomy refers to either one. (“He pulled out his anatomy.” “I caught a glimpse of her anatomy.”) Tail was once used both for men’s and women’s genitals. At one time cock was synonymous with “vagina” in parts of the American South. In that region, b
oody— an Elizabethan era play on “body”—was first euphemistic for either gender’s sex organ, then for women’s alone. Although organ can swing both ways, it most often swings in the male direction. According to one old story, when a woman on the witness stand in court was asked if the defendant had “introduced his organ,” she replied, “It was more like a flute, your honor.”
Weaponry
What one calls a penis depends, of course, on where and when one lives. According to classicist J. N. Adams, ancient Romans had at least 120 synonyms for this body part. They included Latin words for “instrument,” “branch,” “throat,” and “worm.” One Latin term, telum, could alternately mean “penis,” “tool,” or “weapon.” Weapons provided the most metaphors for penis, including the word “weapon” itself, and often figured in double entendre–based jokes. In one, a Roman man being frisked by another tells the frisker that he should be careful lest he find a weapon other than the one he’s looking for.
Daggers, lances, stakes, and swords were an especially popular source of synonyms for “penis.” (The fact that the sharp points of such implements could prick probably led to that English word being synonymous with “penis” for at least the past four centuries.) Ancient Romans used plants with stalks as metaphors for “penis,” including cabbage (caulis) and spearmint (mentula). Tool has also referred to the penis since then and still enjoys great popularity among English speakers, perhaps because in Protestant-ethic cultures this synonym equates sex with work.
Since it’s more vague, member is even more useful as a euphemism, as in this translation of Montaigne’s musing on the penis: “We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it.”
When it comes to naming penises, the United States and the United Kingdom part company. Willy is the most popular of many names given English penises, Dick and Peter that of Americans. As an itinerant preacher discovered to his dismay, “Peter” was so closely linked with “penis” among residents of the Ozark Mountains that when he mentioned Peter’s denial of Christ, then shouted, “How many Peters are there here?” he was greeted by shocked silence.
Some men take the initiative and name their own penises. Lyndon Johnson was one. According to biographer Robert Caro, even in college the future president “displayed great pride in his sexual apparatus,” often returning from dates to tell his roommates, “Jumbo had a real workout tonight.” In other cases, it’s a mate who does the naming. Elmore Leonard’s novel Road Dogs features a Cuban gangster whose girlfriend calls his penis “little Ricky” when it is limp, “Ricardo” when erect. (“We’ll be saying hi to your one-eyed buddy Ricardo.”) One inventive woman calls her husband’s beneath-the-sheet erection Omar the tentmaker.
Johnson is the last name most often used for the male sex organ. According to one theory, this slangy euphemism originated with the name of a large railroad brake lever. Lexicographer Eric Partridge thought it was more likely an abbreviated version of Dr. Johnson, a onetime synonym for “penis” that Partridge said might be based on the assumption that “there was no one Dr. [Samuel] Johnson was not prepared to stand up to.” Working under the verbal restraints of his times, Partridge said this synonym was for the “membrum virile.”
Rodney is sometimes mentioned in the torrent of spam e-mails that offer to help men enlarge and recharge their membrum virile. So is King Kong. (“Make your King Kong twice larger.”) Some of these pitches show impressive euphemistic flair: Charge your trouser warrior! Invest in your wang! Excite your pistol! Upsize your manhood! Boost your donger’s staying power! Tired of having a peanut in your pants? Tired of girls searching for your little friend in bed and not being able to find it? Your little friend looks like a dwarf? Time to decide whether you want a bigger pride. Your big proud friend in the pants will overshadow the Empire State Building. She will not need a magnifying glass anymore to find your instrument. Your instrument will be so large you will be able to touch the ceiling with it.
Testicles
When testicles are in the news, broadcasters are forced to improvise. I recently watched a TV announcer report that a male basketball player had been bumped “in a painful area.” After the Today show’s Meredith Vieira accidentally kicked cohost Matt Lauer in the groin during taping, weatherman Al Roker exclaimed, “My goodness, right in the peppercorns!”
Of course, it’s not just testicles per se but what they represent that requires euphemizing on the air. During news coverage of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s audacious maneuvering to avoid impeachment, one CNN analyst said, “There’s a term you can use for this. It involves a male part… [what] an old football coach of mine would refer to as ‘intestinal fortitude.’ ” A colleague chimed in, “Or as we would say in Spanish, ‘cojones.’ ” A few days later, ABC commentator George Will wondered if contemporary political figures had the “kidneys” to make tough decisions. When an Internet commentator subsequently questioned whether Democrats “have the low-hangers necessary to walk away from FOX [News],” he explained in a footnote that low-hangers was “a euphemism for intestinal fortitude, cojones, stones, balls, scrotal presumption, gonads, testicles, manliness…”
To name just a few. Other euphemisms for this body part include marbles, gonads, and, of course, family jewels. No synonym has proved more durable than nuts, however. James McDonald thinks this probably is a clip of nutmegs, a longtime synonym for testicles. After movie censors decreed that “nuts” could not appear in screenplays, this word was dutifully deleted from one script after another (prompting one frustrated screenwriter to substitute almonds for “nuts”).
When Jesse Jackson was inadvertently recorded off-camera telling a TV interviewer that he wanted to cut off Barack Obama’s “nuts,” demonstrating with slashing hands what he had in mind, journalists were faced with a dilemma. Exactly what body part of Obama’s could they say Jackson wanted to delete? “His you-know-what” said one cable news reporter. His “manhood” reported another. In her New York Times column, Maureen Dowd referred to “a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy.” On MSNBC, a commentator said that Jackson had threatened “to do something to Barack Obama [long pause] that wasn’t exactly painless, shall we say.” According to a blogger, Jackson wanted to “expunge Obama’s manhood.”
Like modern newscasters and bloggers, ancient Romans sometimes classified this male body part broadly under the term manhood (especially when referring to the loss of same among castrated men). “Testicle” is based on the Latin term testis, meaning “witness.” “Testis” apparently is the common root for “testicles,” “testimony,” and “testify,” presumably because it was a common practice in ancient times for men to clutch their testicles or those of a monarch when swearing an oath. Noting the male basis of these terms, a feminist once proposed ovarimony as an alternative to “testimony.”
A biblical euphemism for testicles was thigh, as when a dying Jacob said to Joseph in Genesis 24:2, “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh… bury me not in Egypt.” Another ancient synonym for testicles—one that appeared in John Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of the Bible—is ballocks, adapted from the Old English bealluc. “Bollocks” was, and is, a swear word in England, one that spawned the adjective bollocky or ballocky. Although the original version of a venerable song referred to “Ballocky Bill the Sailor,” this eventually was sanitized to “Barnacle Bill the Sailor.” Another spin-off of “bollocks” was bollixed up, a phrase many of us use quite innocently without realizing its racy root.
Stones is a longtime synonym for testicles, one that appeared often in the King James Bible. Noah Webster did not approve, of course, revising a reference to “the sinewe of his stones” in Job 40:17 to “the sinews of his male organs,” and “hath his stones broken” in Leviticus 21:20 to “hath his peculiar members broken.” By the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans found the once-respectable word “stones” too t
ainted for common use. This called for a euphemism for that euphemism, leading to confusion among visitors from abroad. During his tour of southern states before the American Civil War, J. S. Buckingham was told of an incident in which a student threw a rock at the president of the University of Georgia, hitting him in the head. Since in his native England “rock” referred to a large stone, Buckingham commented that this student must have been Hercules-like. Oh no, his female host responded, it was but a small rock and did little harm. Only then did the Englishman realize that this woman was using “rock” instead of “stone,” presumably because of the latter word’s association with testicles.
Men’s genitals consist of three distinct parts: the penis, scrotum, and testicles, facilitating the euphemism process. Women’s genitals are a bit more complicated, comprising the overall pudenda, the outer labia minora and majora, and the inner vagina and vulva (as well as the hymen and clitoris). Since this is a powerful lot of words to consider, we typically use “vagina” synonymously with them all and devote a lot of ingenuity to developing euphemisms for that touchy term.
Vagina
In an old English tale, an aristocratic young woman went horseback riding, accompanied by her groom, John. Along the way, she fell off her horse, feet flying in the air and petticoats dropping. Quickly jumping to her feet, the young woman asked, “Did you see my agility, John?”