on 1/25/03 11:42 PM, Alison Croggon at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> it put paid to my much
> touted position that the vocabularies women had for their fannies
> were hugely limited compared to those for men. (Actually, the
> American usage of fanny, being "bum", is very funny to us down here;
> we still tend to the English usage, meaning vagina, so to fall on
> one's fanny is rather painful and physically challenging image.)
> That disparity between male and female terms is true if you look it
> up in dictionaries and so on, the male slang goes on for pages; but
> clearly oral history, the "mother tongue", is the place to look for
> these private vocabularies, and it's more a comment on the biases of
> those word hoards than on the language itself.
Those linguistically oppressed people of The Faroes have it again! I think
they have the most decent name for the vagina of all! It's called 'Gina' in
that minority of minorites of languages! How sweet! And the 'shocking'
show's made their traditional 'Gina-cookies' redundant. Icelandic, at least,
is spoken by some (possibly) 300.000 - 400.000 people, but Faroese is spoken
by fewer than a 100.000 people.
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
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