English 313, Grammar of Current English Essay

Have you heard these words? This is an informal paper I wrote for "Grammar of Current English." We could choose our topics, so naturally I chose the following...

TALLYWACKERS AND WHICKERBILLS:

PHALLIC SLANG AND EUPHEMISMS IN THE DARE

Say penis and many people will turn their heads. Even reading penis as the second word in this paper, you probably had some kind of reaction; perhaps it made you nervous, blush, or interested to read. English borrowed the word directly from Latin, and according to the OED2 it is the scientific term to reference male genitals. However, many English speakers avoid using penis. It’s just a word, but for some reason it’s a word we’ve all tried to dodge, and people have been dodging it for centuries. Instead of using penis in Deuteronomy 23:1 the writers of the King James Bible chose privy member although penis had already entered the language as an anatomical term. More current Biblical translations use euphemisms like emasculated, genital, or just avoid the term altogether.

            People have been creating alternative words for centuries as shown through “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” hundreds of entries for penis since the word entered the English language in the 17^th century. This paper will analyze a few euphemisms and slang words for penis that entered American English through regional dialects. I will use several dictionaries—mainly the “Dictionary of American Regional English” (DARE), “American Heritage Dictionary” (AHD-5), and “Cassel’s Dictionary of Slang” (CDS)—to give possible explanations of how these words entered the language. As a conclusion, I will discuss a plausible reason most of these words are of Southern origin.

            The corpus of words from the DARE are: jemson, dong, harpoon, pecker, dingus, tallywhacker, hambone, goober, whickerbill, and tommyhawk. Admittedly, when I first read these words in the DARE, I only recognized pecker and dong. Some of them seemed humorously outdated. When I asked my friend if he recognized any of these words he laughed and said, “Yeah, my Grandpa calls me a tallywhacker all the time!” This made sense because the DARE’s quotation examples for tallywhacker mainly came from Southern states, including one from North Carolina. 

            After analyzing the definitions of these 10 words, I realized they all had alternative primary definitions. These primary meanings helped me sort the words into three categories. Words in the first category also meant ‘a general thing’; the second category included words that also meant an object resembling a penis, and words in the third category referred to objects similar to a penis in function.

            Dingus and whickerbill belong in the first category. The AHD5 defines dingus as ‘something whose name is unknown or forgotten’. Whickerbill only appears in the DARE, which gives an alternate definition ‘a contraption, gadget; a doo-hickey’. Interestingly, I discovered several words meaning ‘thing’ could easily be transformed into a slang word for penis if they follow the possessive pronoun his. For example, if I said, “That tight bathing suit revealed his item,” most listeners would assume a specific definition for item.

            The words jemson, dong, hambone, and goober belong in the second category and are visually descriptive of the male penis. The DARE includes a quote from Randolph Wilson’s etymological book “Down in the Holler” that explains that jemson derived from jemson weed, which was a plant believed to carry an “esoteric sexual significance.” The CDS, however, suggests that jemson is related to jemson weed because the plant grows to look like a penis. Hambone the CDS says is a compound word that connotes an image of meat covering a bone, like a human penis. The AHD5 is the only dictionary of the three to list ‘penis’ as a definition for dong. The AHD5, however, suggests that dong may reference the clapper of a bell, and I believe this reference could be visual because the piece in a bell’s center has an oblong shape redolent of a phallus. Goober in the AHD5 is derived from an African word, and was used in the South to mean peanut. Perhaps, the words association with nuts ‘testicles’ led it to acquire this definition, but that is only my conjecture. The CDS also explains that the vulgar slang word cock ‘a type of male bird’ became a term for penis because until the late 19^th century, cock was used to describe anything shaped like a rooster’s head, which expanded to include the penis. Penis-resembling nouns functioning as slang or euphemisms for penis seems common in the English language.

            The remaining four words tallywhacker, harpoon, pecker, and tommyhawk belong in the third category because they had alternative definitions relating to a penis’ function. Tallywhacker is listed in the AHD5, which says it is derived from the earlier word tallywag. Henceforth, tally ‘something fitting into another thing’ combined with wag ‘to move back and forth’ to produce a word meaning penis. A harpoon ‘a barbed dart or spear’ has a similar penetrative action to a penis, and similarly, tommyhawk was a stabbing weapon used by Native Americans. Pecker is a shortening of woodpecker, which is a bird that penetrates a trunk of a tree to find food. All of these words connote phallic actions.

            In my analysis, the first category of words acquired the specialization; the general meaning ‘thing’ narrowed to mean penis. In the other two categories, the definitions generalized. For example, harpoon and dong acquired secondary, virtually metaphoric definitions. Furthermore, the words either initially had negative connotations or pejorated/ acquired negative meanings. Surely when my friend’s grandpa called him a tallywhacker, his expression was not a form of praise.

            My friend’s grandpa is also a native Southerner, and interestingly, a majority of my corpus originated or is widely used in the South. I believe this is likely because Southern proper culture and manners prefers euphemisms for sexual terms. Only two words jemson and dong are specific to regions other than the South.  

            Also, as Southern proper culture dies at the helm of a gauche liberal youth perhaps so many euphemisms are no longer needed. Of course, “Urban Dictionary” has pages upon pages of slang terms for penis, but I think my generation is comfortable sticking with the Latin and a few slang terms. This is evidenced by Google Ngram Viewer, a service of Google that plots how frequently specific words appear in literature from the 1820s to present. A search of penis reveals that the word has nearly tripled in usage since the mid-20^th century. Another interesting finding is that vagina has triply decreased since the early-20^th century, and the DARE has only one entry for vagina. The difference between euphemisms for male and female genitals, however, will have to become the thesis of a different paper.

            Words for penis have been taboo since before Shakespeare’s time, and English speakers are still searching for alternative words. So, the next time you're searching for another word use a word that means ‘thing’ or refers to a noun resembling a penis in form or function. If your word’s primary definition fits in one of those three categories, chances are it’ll pass as slang.