SINCE WE ARE all sensitive about the appearance of our bodies (trust me on this), anatomy provides fertile ground for euphemizing. This topic poses considerable linguistic challenges and always has. “In all manners relating to the human body,” wrote H. L. Mencken several decades ago, “… euphemisms are common and some of them are very old.” At one time, the very word “body” was suspect and gave way to person. (“Contraband was found on her person.”) A woman who grew up in Michigan after World War II recalled that while in grade school, she and her classmates referred to the upper peninsula and lower peninsula of their bodies.
For those whose bodies deviate from the norm—which is to say nearly all of us—euphemisms are welcome. Balding men can be said to have high foreheads. Wrinkled faces feature character lines. Then there’s the matter of weight. When it comes to those whom airlines call people of size, euphemisms are in constant demand. Ever since the Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens reverently painted women who would today be considered candidates for gastric bypass, Rubenesque has been a polite term for women carrying extra pounds, one with artistic and vaguely erotic overtones. Voluptuous does similar duty, as do shapely, curvaceous, and the Yiddish term zaftig. Pleasingly plump lacks sexy flavor, as do buxom, generously proportioned, big-boned, and fluffy. Such terms do keep us from having to say “fat,” though. In a pinch, there’s also ample, plus size, or queen size.
In one of Alexander McCall Smith’s mystery novels, Precious Ramotswe, the “traditionally built” Botswana detective, is described as “more traditionally built than ever—a wide expanse of woman, bulging like the continent of Africa itself.” When Mma Ramotswe is told politely by her mechanic-husband that the suspension problem in her minivan may be due to “distribution of load,” she ponders this message, then says, “And the load, I take it… is me?”
For their part, men needn’t be “fat” when they can be burly, hefty, portly, rotund, or stocky. Sturdy and stout have the advantage of suggesting stalwart. Stout also refers to a rich type of beer and to a courageous sort of man, one who is stouthearted.
Calling ample waists love handles is not gender linked. Nor is bay window for a potbelly, spare tire for an expansive midsection, or well upholstered for the generally overweight. Such terms are usually reserved for men, however. At the other end of the scale, cadaverous women who verge on anorexia can be called willowy, svelte, or simply slender. At worst, they are skinny. Little women are politely called petite, although one small character in a Rona Jaffe novel disdained this adjective as “a euphemism for getting stuck with all the short boys on blind dates.”
“Short” is not a nice word. Among men who don’t feel tall enough, it can be seen as provocative, a fighting word even. Compact is more tactful, as is trim or diminutive. (Vertically challenged is a gag euphemism that I’ve never seen or heard in actual use.) One class of neoeuphemisms consists of words that allude to shortness without spelling it out. Terms such as dapper or natty or scrappy have nothing to do with body size per se but are seldom used for taller men. A description such as “He is thin and spry and has a kindly, elfin air” could only refer to a man who is short. Feisty is often applied to contentious small men but rarely to tall ones. (The etymology of this term is none too flattering. It is based on “feist,” a southernism for a small, yappy dog who has more bark than bite.) At five feet five inches tall, French president Nicholas Sarkozy can be called feisty and is. At six feet six inches tall, his equally contentious predecessor Charles de Gaulle was not. Men like de Gaulle are typically described as stately, distinguished, formidable, or imposing. Imperious is the closest thing to a pejorative allusion to tall men in a society that looks up to them. Tall women are majestic, regal, or Junoesque. Amazonian is ambiguous, a term that can be complimentary or insulting, depending on tone of voice and curl of lip.
When Moreau de St. Méry spent time in America after the revolution, the French exile was struck by how reluctant American women were to mention specific parts of their bodies, even when seeking medical help. A nursing mother he met in Philadelphia had developed painfully cracked nipples. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her doctor what the real problem was, however, instead saying she had stomach pains. According to St. Méry, American women at this time called the section from waist to feet their “ankles”; and from waist to neck, their “stomach.”
Deciding what name to give the digestive organ in our midsection has long posed problems. Even though this had been called a belly with perfect aplomb for centuries, that word eventually succumbed to bourgeois sensibilities. “Belly” was a perfectly functional word. It just didn’t sound respectable. Under Sophia Hawthorne’s busy blue pencil, “belly” was changed to rotundity or paunch any time it appeared in her husband Nathaniel’s journals. An Englishman named J. S. Buckingham, who visited southern states before the Civil War, heard a preacher in Athens, Georgia, reword the Genesis 3:14 passage in which the serpent is commanded “upon thy belly shalt thou go,” to “upon thy stomach shalt thou go.” When a French physician asked a Victorian Englishwoman if she was feeling pain in her belly, the elderly woman grew flustered. After regaining her composure, she told the doctor that he should avoid using that dreadful word when treating English patients. And what word should he use instead? “Stomach,” the woman replied.
So stomach it was. Once again, a word rooted in Latin (stomachos) elbowed aside a sturdy Anglo-Saxon antecedent. Not even belly dancers were exempt. The first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s 1894 play Salome featured a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley of a topless belly dancer titled “The Stomach Dance.” As late as 1962, during a performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel for Britain’s royal family, the line, “Our hearts are warm, our bellies full” became “Our hearts are warm, and we are full.”
Why not simply say “our stomachs are full”? Perhaps because by then the contamination effect had kicked in and “stomach” was a bit outré. Following World War I, H. L. Mencken noted that “stomach” had become an “outlaw” term in England. “No Englishman of good breeding, save he be far gone in liquor, ever mentions his stomach in the presence of women, clergymen, or the Royal family,” wrote Mencken. American stomachs were another matter. According to Mencken, his countrymen discussed this body part as freely as they talked about their business. Moreover, he said, in the United States, “stomach” was used “with a degree of respect verging upon reverence,” doubling “as a euphemism for the whole region from the diaphragm to the pelvic arch.”
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 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.”
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, boody— 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.”
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.
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 tainted 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.
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?”
“Yes, miss,” replied her groom, “but I never heard it called by that name before.”
And what names might he have heard? In Elizabethan times, it could have been commodity, slit, cut, breach, or the king’s highway. In his 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose included money (defined as “A girl’s private parts, commonly applied to little children: as, Take care, Miss, or you will shew your money”), pitcher (“The miraculous pitcher, that holds water with the mouth downwards: a woman’s commodity”), and hat (“A woman’s privities: because frequently felt”). In addition to monosyllable, Grose sometimes used **** in place of cunt. During a long-ago court case that he reported, a woman on the witness stand referred to her gender’s cauliflower. The presiding judge reprimanded this witness, saying she might as well call that private part an artichoke. “Not so, my lord,” she replied, “for an artichoke has a bottom, but a **** and a cauliflower have none.”
This woman’s invention drew on a long tradition of substituting horticultural euphemisms for the vagina. They include cabbage, mushroom, split fig, and sweet potato pie. When papaya became slang for vagina in Cuba, another name was conjured for that fruit among polite speakers: fruta de bomba. (Stories have been told of tourists asking a Cuban fruit vendor for a papaya, only to be angrily told that he was no pimp.) In Japan, the clam that shrinks is a vaginal metaphor comparable to English speakers’ the bearded clam. Other living creatures whose names have provided synonyms for the vagina include not just kittens and beavers but snails as well. In Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, a Romanian woman travels to Hungary with a bag of smuggled gold “stuffed up her snail.” (“I wouldn’t buy gold that had been in the snail of some woman,” comments the novel’s narrator.)
As compared to the more assertive synonyms for “penis,” substitute names for women’s sexual organs tend to be softer, gentler, more classically euphemistic. The 650 terms John Farmer and William Henley recorded in their late-nineteenth-century compilation of slang included mossy bank, lamp of love, and lowlands. The same book had just half as many synonyms for “penis.” This reflects the fact that in most eras and settings, discussion of the female sex organ is more taboo than discussion of that of the male. A study commissioned by the BBC and others at the turn of this century found that participants considered “cunt” the most vulgar English word in common use. (“Fuck” was third, “prick” seventh.) A survey of ticklish body parts conducted by linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge determined that the vagina was the most difficult one for participants to mention by any name. This taboo is illustrated in a passage of Richard Russo’s novel Mohawk, which depicts a low-life couple insulting each other. The woman repeatedly refers to the man’s weeny. That man, however, in the author’s words, used “a simple four letter word to describe his companion and it is a part of her own anatomy.”
“Vagina” originated as Latin slang based on the word for sheath, the receptacle in which Roman soldiers inserted their swords. (Little girls in ancient Rome were told to call this organ their piggy.) From its slangy roots, this term became standard issue after being adopted by medieval anatomists. “So, thanks to similes and early anatomists,” writes Catherine Blackledge in The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, “humans have sex with sheaths and tails. It could have been worse, though; it could have been a combination of the king’s highway and cabbage stalks.”
In a study of how vaginas are referred to in contemporary England, men proved far more willing than women to use slang synonyms. Women preferred vague euphemisms such as down below, downstairs, middle, and, of course, private parts. One Englishwoman was embarrassed to discover that when taken to a hospital after injuring her genitals on the crossbar of a bicycle, she couldn’t think of any non-euphemistic word for that part of her body. “My mum used to call it a tuppence,” recalls another. A third woman’s mum apparently placed less value on this body part. “When I went out in my teens,” her daughter recalls, “I was told to keep your hands on your halfpenny and everybody else’s off!”
According to an old jest, one James Joyce incorporated into Ulysses, when women of a certain age bathed standing erect, they first washed up as far as possible, then down as far as possible, then washed “old possible.” From bits to down there, when it comes to euphemisms for the vagina, blandness reigns. Gloria Steinem once referred to herself as a member of the “down there generation.” A participant in an online woman’s forum who still used “down there,” added, “I did just think of saying ‘down in Virginia,’ while pointing my finger downward and slightly lowering my head.” Another said she hated the coyness of “down there” or “private bits” and stuck to “vagina.” But this word was hard for her little girl to pronounce, one participant found. She first said “bachina,” then shortened it to “China,” and “we have both been happy with Chinas ever since!!!” her mom reported.
Several mothers who took part in this forum agreed that “vagina” was a bit clinical for their young daughters but were at a loss for a better alternative. “I’m going with… ‘girl parts’ for now,” said one. Another reported that her daughter calls it her stuff. According to a third mom, since their family calls her son’s penis his peepee, that’s what her daughter calls her vagina. The mother of a three-year-old said that while frolicking in a spray fountain, her daughter announced, “Mommy, my cooch is getting wet!” (This semicommon euphemism could derive from the Arabic cush or the Sanskrit cushi, meaning “ditch,” a synonym for “vagina.”)
With so little guidance from society, those who need to refer to this body part sometimes simply roll their own euphemisms. Some of the more colorful inventions include mussintouchit, pookalolly pie, the love cavern, squishy, and split knish. One woman calls her vagina Rochester because that’s where she lost her virginity. Another calls hers the downtown dining and recreation district.
More recent euphemisms draw on new resources. Due to modern depilation methods, we’re now able to talk comfortably about the wax line, bikini line, or bikini zone. An Oprah-endorsed attempt to have vajayjay become the preferred synonym for “vagina” hasn’t caught on despite being used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which a pregnant doctor in labor tells a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay.” Euphemisms don’t lend themselves to that type of self-conscious coinage. Vag (or vaj) has gained some traction recently, mostly among younger women. A universally acceptable euphemism for female genitalia has yet to be agreed on.
When Lord Methuen was shot in the buttocks during the Boer War, a military communiqué said he’d been wounded in the fleshy part of the thigh so as not to suggest that the British field marshal had been facing backward when shot.
For a long time, “arse” was standard English for this body part. The fact that Samuel Johnson included this word in his 1755 dictionary raised few eyebrows. Johnson did delicately define “bum” as “the part on which we sit” (leading one critic to ask, “Do you mean a chair, Doctor?”). This definition may have inspired subsequent euphemisms for the behind such as sit upon, sit-me-down, and sit-me-down-upon that were once popular in Britain. Perhaps coincidentally, the word “chair” itself took on connotations in the nineteenth century and gave way to seat.
Although “ass” was initially a politer form of “arse,” both words fell victim to language cleansing to such an extent that the animal once known as an “ass” became a donkey to many. Instead of calling an obnoxious individual a “jackass,” one proper Englishwoman took to calling such a person a Johnny bum. According to Francis Grose, this woman “would not say Jack, because it was vulgar, nor ass because it was indecent.”
“Buttocks” has proved durable as the most respectable term for this body part. “Bum” occupies a verbal purgatory in England and Canada: not quite respectable nor outrageously offensive. As recently as the Depression era, however, Al Jolson’s 1933 film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum was retitled Hallelujah, I’m a Tramp in Britain.
Referring to the buttocks and the anus has always posed problems during polite conversation. In their survey of ticklish body parts, Allan and Burridge found that the anus (another Latinism) ranked second only to the vagina as the least mentionable anatomical feature. This is an area where foreignisms really earn their keep. Reviewing euphemisms for the buttocks (or “butt”) is like a short course in foreign languages. Consider derriere, heinie, and culo. Even the nursery word tooky comes from the Yiddish tokhes (from the Hebrew tachat, or “underneath”), also known as the tushie or tush. Such terms can be uttered with nary a twitch of the lip by English speakers who might studiously avoid saying “ass,” “arse,” “butt,” “bum,” “buns,” “can,” “rump,” “seat,” “tail,” “rear end,” or even “behind.” In a mid-1930s New York Times ad, Bonwit Teller responded to an inquiry from a woman who wanted to flatten her figure. “This question is posed most frequently by women who have large derrieres,” observed Bonwit.
Another synonym for the buttocks is keister. Ronald Reagan was particularly partial to this mock-foreign term that may derive from kiste, a German word for a “box” or a “chest.” A modern verb, to keister, means “to hide something in one’s rectum.” (“I keistered those joints and sailed right through customs.”)
The common use of bottom as a euphemism for “arse” has caused much anguish among the world’s Bottomleys, Ramsbottoms, Winterbottoms, Higginbottoms, and Hickinbottoms, leading some of them to take refuge in respelled versions such as Higginbotham and Hickinbotham. (The “bottom” in those names actually drew on an earlier use of that word for “bottomlands.”) In a yarn recounted by Robert Graves, an English prankster invited a group of notables with bottom-based names to a formal dinner, one at which rump steak was served, then watched in delight as the name of each guest was announced before he made an early exit.
One reason that body parts are so ticklish to talk about has nothing to do with their anatomical delicacy or even their sexual functions and everything to do with the liquids and gases that emerge from them. In an evolutionary anomaly, body parts such as the behind and the genitalia are used both for sex and secretion. This makes them doubly difficult to discuss. If anything, the elimination of body wastes is even more embarrassing to talk about than sex. As a result, it is one of our leading sources of euphemisms.