Vinculación con la programación de los servicios de control y servicios relacionados

There once was a young man from Kent Whose thing was so long that it bent. To save himself trouble

He put it in double,

And instead of coming he went.

—limerick

LANGUAGE

It's taken three hundred years for penis, the word, to enter the English vernacular. Penis, Latin for tail, was first employed in English in a late-seventeenth-century medical text—and because it sounds scientific it gained limited currency as a euphemism when the commonly used “prick” began to seem too racy. But it never really caught on, probably because it was meant for polite conversations, and no one wanted to have polite conversations about pricks. At least not until recently.

Ever since penis became a word of choice for the 1990s it's been a regular feature in books and movies, where characters use it to have polite conversations about pricks. These conversations hardly existed in books and movies before. In movies penises just weren't mentioned. In books, for sexual descriptions, writers usually preferred more intimate, sexy words like cock and prick—the words actual lovers use.

Use of the word penis has brought the word dick along with it almost into the mainstream. Penis is a more formal word than dick. With the word penis you can have a casual conversation in a restaurant, even with your mother, if she's game. Use the word dick and your mother might think you were taking liberties. Dick is a better word for telling jokes with—but the word penis, because it's awkward to say, and it conjures up something anatomically ungainly, can itself be used for comic effect. Though dick can't be used on television or in a family newspaper, it's preferred in some books and movies—for example, the movie Chasing Amy, about a love affair between a heterosexual man and a woman who's a lesbian most of the time. These characters pride themselves on their frankness about sex, and the companionable dick is the best word for that frankness.

There are many other words that can be used to mean penis, and if you search you can find lists of them. On the Internet there's an erection page, where the proprietor hopes to collect “the world's largest (no pun intended) collection of names for an erection.” The annual readers’ survey in a magazine called Men includes a list sent in by readers. Such lists overflow with fanciful, affectionate names like “bald-headed mouse,” “love rod” and “husband of nature,” which people must stay up late at night inventing.

In China and India the penis is addressed with deference: Indian/Tibetan terms include Arrow of Love, Jewel, Scepter; among the Chinese terms are Jade Stalk, Jade Flute, Crimson Bird, Ambassador. The common English words for penis, on the other hand, are likely to be disrespectful: dick, prick, cock, schlong, joint, Johnson, meat, member, pecker, rod, peter, putz, tool, willy, dong, wong, ding- dong, weenie (“family jewels” would seem to be an exception, but I've never heard it used without irony). Rude terms for an erection include: boner, hard-on, woody, pecker wood, chubby, stiffy. In New Zealand, I was told, getting a hard-on is called “snarling,” because “it's angry and it's just about to bite you.”

In America we sometimes use words for the penis in describing people. These terms are never complimentary. A prick is a mean, hard penis or person; a dick is friendly but pushy, at the ready, maybe not too bright; a putz is little and mean; a schlong is big and sloppy; a pecker is hard and wily; a tool is just a tool; a dickhead is totally annoying and stupid; a cocksucker is the lowest of the low. (Right here you have the essence of men's ambivalence about their cocks. They love having them sucked, and yet they find it unthinkable that anyone—particularly anyone male—could love to suck them.)

Joint and rod are businesslike appellations, and we don't apply them to people. A ding-dong is an idiot, someone who has no control over his private parts or anything else. I like the term Johnson for a penis, because of its dignity and formality. Roger is another man's name that can mean penis; to roger also means to fuck. Etymologists think roger came to be used for penis because farmers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for some reason used to give the name to their bulls.

Prick and cock are two of the oldest English names for the penis. Shakespeare used prick to mean penis in the sixteenth century in such punning verses as this from As You Like It: “He that sweetest rose will find/Must find love's prick and Rosalinde.” During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries prick was even used as a pet name, but by the late seventeenth century prudery had set in, and the word was gradually banned from written language. In 1861, bowdlerizers changed the above passage from As You Like It to read, “Must find love's thorn and Rosalinde.” The first use of prick as a name for a penislike person was dated to 1929 by the Oxford English Dictionary, but lexicographer Hugh Rawson, to whose Wicked Words I'm indebted for this account, believes the usage is much older. Cock derives from the word for the male barnyard fowl, and is such a common synonym for penis that two hundred years ago prudish Americans began referring to that fowl as a rooster. A number of other words were changed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to appease offended sensibilities. Apricock became apricot; haycock became haystack; weathercock became weathervane.

Schlong is Yiddish for snake, or penis. Putz and schmuck are rude Yiddish terms for penis that derive from German words for ornament or jewel. Putz is worse than schmuck. Both are now used almost entirely to mean jerk. Yet as recently as 1962 the groundbreaking comic Lenny Bruce was arrested in Los Angeles for using schmuck and putz on stage—“by a Yiddish undercover agent,” Bruce said in How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, “who had been placed in the club several nights running to determine if my use of Yiddish terms was a cover for profanity.” For elderly Jews the terms are still taboo.

Dick meaning penis dates back at least to 1891. The term may derive from Donkey Dick, which was what people used to call male jackasses in the eighteenth century. In the American underworld a dick

is a detective and a policewoman is a Dickless Tracy. Dick is also used as a verb, meaning to copulate or to cheat—as in this piece of graffiti cited in American Speech in 1980, “Dick Nixon before he dicks you.”

LITERATURE

Penises have adorned our songs and stories for as long as songs and stories have existed. Shakespeare's plays were strewn with double entendres involving pricks and cocks. Rabelais, in the rambunctious Gargantua and Pantagruel, brought up penises whenever the spirit took him; the Marquis de Sade wrote about little else. But it wasn't until D. H. Lawrence published his erotic masterpiece, Lady Chatterley's Lover, that descriptions of sex acts in plain English became part of literature. First printed in an edition of 1,000 copies in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover created a sensation even though most people had to read an expurgated version, missing all the sensational parts. It became a milestone in the fight against censorship when the entire text was published in New York in 1959 and a U.S. District Court judge ruled that it was not obscene.

Liberated by that decision, fiction writers in the U.S. and Britain have published innumerable descriptions of sex acts and penises performing them. In at least four of these works, penises have attained the status of memorable characters. If you read the works in chronological order you can observe the way our attitudes toward penises have changed.