Genitalia

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>        I seem to owe an apology to those who did not realize that my
>"prurience" comment was tongue-in-cheek.

Probably most of us realized it ... or at least assumed it.

>... I ask for the pronunciation of
>"nishi."  If it is [niSI], a likely source is French "niche."  If it is
>[nISI], "knish" is the likely candidate (but see below).

The spelling "nishi" is obviously 'non-English'. Also 'non-French' etc. But
who knows who decided to use this spelling, or why? Certainly it is
perfectly standard in transliterated Japanese, and in many other languages.

>What would "Gladys Spiegelman" be rhyming slang for?

A mystery.

>I don't find "connie" transparent, unless it has remained buried for
>a hundred years (older "cunny"), and the same for "poonani."

"Connie" recalls "cunny" and also French "con", etc. There is an old story
about "coney" -- see, for example, under "Coney Island" in Hendrickson's
"Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" -- sometimes these stories are
apocryphal of course ....

"Poonani" recalls the conventional "poon", "poontang", with the same sense;
Spears' dictionary also shows "poonoo", again = "female genitals". My
personal superficial impression is that these are from French 'putain' and
that the West African origin suggested by some is bogus, but I remain open
to correction ....

Those who subscribe to long-range comparison theories may note the
essentially universal cognates given for example by Ruhlen ("The Origin of
Language" [Wiley, 1994], p.103) -- words like 'put'/'but' for
"vagina"/"vulva" in almost all of the world's language phyla ... no doubt
'putain' and 'boody' as well as 'pudenda' can be connected thusly. (^_^)

>... I find it hard to think that the initialism
>"VA" would be used ....

I do too, but there it is. I also find it hard to think that one could
compile a word list like the one in question which does not include a
single item familiar to me, but there it is ....

-- Doug Wilson