Question regarding phallic symbols

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Mar 1 06:53:47 UTC 2001


At 1:53 PM -0500 3/1/01, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM referred to:
>      "an excerpt from Gilbert and Sullivan's little-known operetta,
>       _Xena; or, The Warrior Princess_"
>
>which contains the line
>
>      My sword is rather phallic, but my chakram's rather yonical[4]
>
>The footnote reads
>
>      [4] yonical: "Yonic" is the female counterpart to "phallic".
>
Ah yes, I'd forgotten that immortal verse.  But it always bothered me
that the Xeniad requires rhyming "yonical" with "ironical", which
(unlike, say, the rhymes of "barbarian" with "sagittarian",
"antiquarian", and "Indo-Aryan") struck me as forced--the former
clearly demands a long (and fully-rounded) O.

larry



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