Monday, June 09, 2008

Usually I have to be drunk to write about vaginas

Jezebel.com has vibrator reviews. As far as I can recall, every one of these reviews has boiled down to "Eh, it's OK, but it's no Hitachi magic wand."*

Anyway, I was reading the review of the last device that didn't, erm, measure up and I noticed the fascinating number of terms women have for their vaginas, from the clinical to the cutesy. It reminded me of a college friend's odd little vagina terminology story that I posted for the Vagina monologue anniversary.

The human impulse to name and nickname things fascinates me. I wonder why we do it, perhaps to signify the thing's meaning to us?

Linguist Friend has a mouse in his house that has mostly escaped the cat's attention and has survived being caught multiple times. After awhile, LF gave up and named it "Stewart." Now sometimes LF and I will be talking on the phone and he will say something like "Oh, look who raced by! Hello Stewart!" Thus a mouse is elevated to a pet.

To bring it back to vaginas, I always assume when I'm writing something that a woman who talks about her "vadge" is a different sort of woman from one who has a specific name for it. A woman who thinks about her "naughty bits" probably doesn't talk about them much at all.

Dunno.

CC
who has a car she calls the "Hot Tomato," so she's far from immune.

*But then, what is?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As you've probably guessed, I name things a lot. Every one of my cars has had at least one name.
I had, many years ago, a friend who had named her vagina "Glida" which is Hebrew for ice cream, she said. I never heard why ice cream.... and I'm not guessin'....

LinguistFriend said...

The next time I see Stewart, I will tell him that he has come up
on the blogosphere. I think that he will be pleased to hear about it.