6000 Ways to Say "Penis"

As an undergrad Modern Languages major, I studied Spanish, French, German, and Greek.  In grad school in Comparative Literature, I studied Italian, Russian, and Turkish.  Since then, I've studied several other languages.  Of course, I didn't get far in most, and they fade away over time; today, about all I can get by in are the original Spanish, French, and German.

But I'm still interested in languages, particularly isolates, the remnants of ancient language families that have somehow managed to avoid the encroachment of economically-superior English, Spanish, Urdu, Chinese, or Arabic.

Actually, I don't really want to learn these languages; I just want to meet men who speak a language unlike any other in the world, and maybe learn a few new words for penis or My hotel is nearby.

1. Burushaski: 87,000 speakers in mountains of far northern Pakistan, near the borders of China and Tajikstan.

Their valley, Hunza, was the source of the Shangri-La legend.  Travelers said that they had no wars or disputes, and eternal youth.  So this Burushaski gym rat could be over 100.  He's had a shipen since he was about 20; before that, it was a sushun.

Tash chom means pull, sex appeal, and to find someone to spend the night with.



2. Tarascan (Purepecha), the remnants of an empire that threatened the Aztecs in precolonial Mexico, now has 240,000 speakers in Michioacan.

Kuini in Purepecha means penis, bird, and prison term.  I'm wondering about the prison term.

3. Mapuche: 250,000 speakers in southern Ecuador.  Their leader Capulican is memoralized in a Beefcake statue.

The slogan of the Mapuche civil rights movement is Newen penis, "Power to Mapuche Brothers."

The Mapuche word for penis is punun, which, by the way, is the same as the Quechua word for bed. 

They specialize in a novelty carving called an Indio Picaro, a smiling Mapuche Indian who, when you raise him up, displays an erect penis.

4. Basque, with 720,000 speakers in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. Yuri and I visited Basque country in 1999 in search of the world's largest penis.

Which, in Basque, is zakil.

5. But the biggest of the language isolates is Korean, with 78 million speakers.

The average Korean penis length is 3.8", the smallest in the world (the U.S.is 5.0").

There's a blog that attempts to answer this unjust accusation, offering proof that the Korean eumgyeong is just as big as anybody else's.

See also: 18 Yiddish Words for Penis; In Search of the Lapp Penis.

I Catch Cousin Joe in the Act

Rock Island, December 1976

When I was in junior high, I caught my friend Brian trying to erase graffiti from the wall of Washington Junior High, "Brian gives free LBJs."  He wouldn't say what it meant, and I had no idea.  It endured season after season, year after year, ghostly pale but still legible, stubbornly resistant to the generations of custodians who attempted to erase it.  It was the biggest riddle of my childhood.

During the summer after 9th grade, I learned that the term "BJ" referred to oral sex, but I didn't make the connection to gay people until a cold Friday at Christmastime in 1976, my junior year at Rocky High, shortly after I discovered what "gay" meant.

Aunt Nora was visiting for the holidays, with two whole carloads of relatives.  Cousin Joe, a 22-year old college senior, was staying in the attic room with Ken and me, and his girlfriend Sandy was staying downstairs with my sister.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, everyone was out shopping or ice skating, but I didn't feel well and stayed in to read.  Joe and Sandy came in, said hello, then vanished somewhere into the house -- I assumed they went down to the basement rec room to play pingpong.

They weren't playing pingpong.

Soon I got a throbbing headache, so I took an aspirin and decided to go upstairs to bed.

The door at the bottom of the attic stairs didn’t lock, but the clatter of shoes on the bare wood was usually an adequate early-warning signal, giving you plenty of time to stop watching late-night tv, reading comics, or whatever else you didn’t care to have witnessed -- but today I was wearing only socks, and the throb in my head made me go slowly, one step at a time. So they didn’t hear me.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw Joe lying on the floor on his side of the room, and Sandy kneeling over him.  My first thought was that he had fainted. Then I saw a thick, heavy shaft the color of putty.  Joe's penis!

I had seen it several times before -- while changing clothes to go swimming, once while skinny-dipping.  I walked in on him in the bathroom when I was five.  It was always breathtaking.

Suddenly Joe saw me, pushed Sandy away, and quickly zipped up. “Um...we were....we were just..."   He was blushing red.

"I don't care, I'm sick."  I walked the five steps to the bed I was sharing with Ken, fell down face-first, and covered my head with a pillow.  "It's no big deal. You’re not the first person in this room to give a bj.”

They were both silent. I peered out from under the pillow to see them staring open-mouthed.

“What’s your problem?”


“You. . .give bjs?” Sandy asked.

“Of course I  give them!” I said angrily. “You think I’m a virgin? I’ve given them lots of times.”

Joe laughed. “Gee, you're dumb! Boys don’t give bjs, they get them.”

“No, I give them. . .boys give them.” My head was still throbbing, making it hard to concentrate.   "Why do you think it's called giving a bj?  Because you give your penis..."

"The girl gives the b.j. to the boy, Boomer."

“Well. . .to be fair, it doesn’t have to be a girl,” Sandy said. “Sometimes guys do give bjs.  At least they're sort of like guys."  She flashed a loose wrist.

My face burned as I realized what she was implying.

"Be nice!" Joe commanded.  He patting my shoulder.  "Boomer just got mixed up.  Don't tell Mom about seeing us...you know...ok?"

"Don't worry, your secret is safe with me."

"And your secret is safe with us!" Sandy managed to say before Joe grabbed her and dragged her down the stairs.

I lay in bed, mortified.  But now I understood -- LBJ, BJ with an "L" added.  Long ago some bullies had accused Brian of being gay. No wonder he worked so furiously to scrub the graffiti off!

It turns out that I was wrong.  Five years later, in the spring of 1981, I would discover that the phrase LBJ had nothing to do with sex.  But it did have quite a lot to do with being gay.

Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation

Rock Island, July 1970

Looking back to my childhood in Rock Island, it's hard to believe that we crammed so much activity into the 12 weeks of summer:
Camping in Michigan or Minnesota
Nazarene summer camp
Visiting relatives in Indiana
My birthday excursion
Vacation Bible School
The Denkmann School Carnival
The Pow Wow, the Celtic Festival, and the Beiderbecke Jazz Festival
Summer Enrichment Classes in astronomy, Spanish, archaeology, and music.

And when we got a free moment, swimming lessons.

When you live between two rivers, you learn to swim.  I took lessons every summer from 4th grade to 7th grade at the Longview Park Pool.

It was great.  Boys and girls classes met at different times, so my group consisted entirely of cute boys, including my best friend Bill, Greg (the vampire boy who gave me my first kiss), Craig (who joined the swim team in high school, and invited me to "get down" at his graduation party), and eventually my brother and his friends.

And the teacher was always a cute teenage boy, tanned and muscular in red Rocky High swim trunks.

Unfortunately, I never got to see them with their swim trunks off,  so no glimpses of a penis (the adults called it a shame).  We weren't allowed in the bath house (where the showers and lockers were).  After the lessons, we had to sit on towels, sopping wet, while one of our mothers drove us home.

It was fun learning to jump into the pool, float on your back, and kick against those floating surfboards.  Then the dog paddle, the breast stroke, the back stroke, and the side stroke.

But when we had to jump off the diving board into the deep end and swim to the side of the pool, I balked.

"It's over my head!  I'll drown!"

"It's easy," Matt, the hunky teenage teacher, said.  "You already know how to swim.  This is just in deeper water."

"I'll sink to the bottom and drown!"

I watched from several feet away as my friends, one by one, jumped off the diving board, sank into the bright clear water of the deep end, then rose to the surface and kicked their way across the pool to the side, where Matt was waiting to pull them out.

His muscular arms rippling in the sunlight....I wanted muscular arms around me....

But...no!  "It's over my head!"

Matt put a strong hand on my shoulder.  "Tell you what, Boomer.  I'll get into the water with you.  That way if anything goes wrong, I can carry you to the side."

Carry me?  "You promise?"

"Sure.  And even if you do drown, I know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."

I didn't know what that meant, but I liked the mouth-to-mouth part.  I climbed onto the diving board.  It felt hot in the sun, and a little wobbly.  Matt, floating upright in the water, motioned me in.  He was smiling.

With a gulp I jumped off the board.  Cold, bubbly water enveloped me.  I couldn't hear, couldn't breathe.  The surface was miles away. How could I ever get up again? It was over my head!

Springing to the surface, I yelled "Help!"

Instantly Matt had his arm around me, and with two kicks had us on the side of the pool.  He lifted us up.  I felt a surge of joy as I clung to his chest, my hands clutching his thick hard shoulders.

I wrapped my legs around him.  Our swimtrunks pressed together.  I felt the thick mass of his shame beneath.

"See?  That wasn't so bad," Matt said, disentangling me. "It was actually kind of groovy, wasn't it?"

Flushed with a weird, tingly excitement, I nodded.  "Are you going to do mouth-to-mouth resuction?"

He laughed.  "Not this time, buddy.  You're fine."

I wouldn't figure "it" for years, but in retrospect, that was a major coming out moment.