"taint", anatomical

[Victor Steinbok]

As JL pointed out earlier, there is no evidence of "nifkin" being used
in this manner outside of the single throw-away Wiki line and two dozen
UD entries. There are plenty of ghits for "nifkin", but only the UD ones
have anything to do with the subject. The rest are almost entirely
nicknames or other random spurious scraps. A relatively large cluster is
related to two children's books (OK, "young adult") that have "Nifkin"
in the title (both as a name) from 1982 and 1998. GB finds another
cluster of books where Nifkin is used as a dog name.

On the other hand, "bifkin" gets nearly as many hits--most similar
"nifkin", but also including UD, FarLex, FreeDictionary.com,
dictionaryslang.com and several others. "Bifkin" almost sounds like it
could be an Yiddishism or some odd Scottish word. Of course, that's all
subjective and someone else could just as well say that "nifkin" sounds
like an Yiddishism. FWIW "bifkin" cites appear to be somewhat older, but
I found no book characters named "Bifkin". Most GB hits for "bifkin" and
some for "nifkin" appear to be OCR errors for "Rifkin". /That/ is a
common surname. I am not convinced that "Nifkin" is particularly common.
Finally, one of the UD entries for "nifkin" suggests that this was based
on a mishearing/misspelling of "bifkin", which certainly sounds
plausible to me--not that I've ever heard either one.

"Gooch" is a common nickname. "Grundle" sounds like it could be a common
surname, although I've never encountered one.

     VS-)

On 4/13/2012 11:16 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote
>> "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

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