"taint", anatomical

[Jonathan Lighter]

> "A wide variety of slang terms are commonly used for this area of the
human body..."

A typical pop pronouncement on slang, based on very little.

"Taint" is the only such synonym I've ever encountered, and in forty years
of slang collecting from every kind if source - including movies and
humans, which OED used to eschew, that happened fewer than a half dozen
times.  Has anyone here - more attentive to language than most - had a
dramatically different experience?
(It doesn't appear, for ex., in Rodgers's fantasmagoric _Queen's
Vernacular_  of 1972.)

So what are the odds that "a wide variety" of such terms are "commonly"
used? (HDAS has _choad_, but not in this sense.)

There may have been a seismic cultural shift relating to the grundle area
in the last decade or so that might not have filtered down to my level, but
I doubt it.  Interest in such synonyms undoubtedly arose in the wake of
publishing smashes like _The Sensuous Woman_, _The Joy of Sex_, and
_Letters to Penthouse_.

Jon Green etymologizes "grundle" (not in HDAS) from a 16th C. term for a
short person.

"Grundle," Gooch" and "Nifkin" are all uncommon American surnames, FWIW.

JL

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "taint", anatomical
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Apr 13, 2012, at 6:23 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > I've seen "grundle" in recent slang dictionaries but nowhere else.
> > "Nifkin," nowhere.
> >>
> >>> On Apr 12, 2012, at 10:20 PM, James Harbeck wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> An alternate term for the perineum that I heard on a Saturday Night
> Live
> >>>> sketch once is ABC -- anus-ball connector. I don't know how popular it
> >>>> is.
>
> >>>> I find, in Urban Dictionary, a definition that gives as synonyms
> >>>> "grundle" and "nifkin," neither of which heretofore known to me, but
> both
> >>>> of which having very good presences in Urban Dictionary.
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perineum:
>
> In human anatomy, the perineum ... is a region of the body including the
> perineal body and surrounding structures. There is some variability in how
> the boundaries are defined, but the term generally includes the genitals
> and anus.
>
> ... A wide variety of slang terms are commonly used for this area of the
> human body, most commonly "chode," "gooch," or "taint," or even "the spot
> where God sewed us up" but they generally refer to a smaller, less
> inclusive area -- just the surface skin region between the anus and the
> scrotum or vaginal opening.
>
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