Extensive timelines of slang for genitalia

Extensive timelines of slang for genitalia

"Jonathon Green, a slang lexicographer, has two new timelines. The first is an interactive timeline that shows slang for male genitalia going all the way back to the 1300s up to present. Colors and shapes represent different parts. Then naturally there's the timeline for female genitalia. It has slang terms that date back to 1250. Yep."

Reader comment:

My hypothesis: “prick” started out as a reference to the female genitalia before switching to the male. (This is obviously an excuse to use the word “prick”, but I digress…)

It actually appears to have first been formulated by Eric Partridge in the folds of “Shakespeare’s Bawdy”, which had a detailed analysis of Mercutio’s line in Act II, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet, “'Tis no less, I tell you, for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.” We know it’s vulgar, but we’re a bit in the dark as to why. Partridge picked the metaphor to pieces and concluded that the clock dial was supposed to be a female crotch and the “prick” was the gash in the middle. I would go farther and say that it was a built in stage direction for a goosing of the Nurse by Mercutio.

When you look at all the other uses of “prick” or “prick’d” in the Shakespeare canon, you’ll see that when they are sure what the term means in a non-innuendoed context, it’s a verb for putting a hole in something with a pointy thing, or a noun for the resultant hole. Like a pinprick. So my guess is that when Little Billy S. got his hands on “prick” it meant lady bits and was also a verb for the act of genital interaction. Meaning being slippery and transitive, it made its way down the shaft of the verb form and stuck to the male genitals as “pricker” for a while before the original sense of “prick” for vagina was forgotten and “pricker” was abbreviated to “prick” for convenience. This isn’t totally unprecedented, we do know that “punk” started out as a word for prostitutes and became masculinized over the same time frame.

Which takes the weirdness of Sonnet 20 to a whole new level, since it now becomes about the poet’s assertively butch girlfriend.