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Willendorf, a fat little prehistoric fertility figurine, called her “bulging, bulbous, bubbling . . .
bent over her own belly . . . eternally pregnant. She broods, in all senses
. . . swollen . . . weighed down by her inflated mounds of breast, belly, and buttock” (Sexual
Personae, 1990, pp. 55-56).
Paglia’s intuition got it exactly right: B is about swelling, inflation, bulges. In a
paper 1 published the same year as Paglia’s book, the linguist John Lawler used very similar
terms to gloss bl- words like blimp, bladder, bloat, and blister. They represent “contained
fluid,” he said, “(either liquid or gas) under pressure, with distinctive distension of its
container, producing a natural roundness.” Plain b- represents it too, as in barrel, ball,
balloon, billow, and Paglia’s “bulging, bulbous, bubbling.” And how do we make balloons and
bubbles bulge? By blowing: we blow bubbles, blow up balloons.
Blowing, you see, because B evokes “airiness” through mouth-pantomime. It’s an
airy sound. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say “buh”—you’ll feel a very distinct
puff of air that you can’t feel if you say “nuh” or “yuh” or most other consonants. I’m certain
that the air-puff made by articulating the sound of B is why many languages, including our
own, tend to use B words to name inflated, bulging things. And the written letter has
evolved a bulging shape to reinforce the idea, a shape explicitly resembling the most bulbous
part of the self-interested mammals who invented the alphabet: a nice round bottom.
Big bottoms! Anything inflated seems big almost by definition. Samuel Johnson’s
1755 dictionary partly defined big as “full of something . . . distended, swoln.” Big is one of
the prime B words, one of the prime B ideas. When Jonathan Swift created a race of giants
in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he called them Brobdingnagians. The biggest dinosaur was a
brontosaurus. The Bible mentions a huge animal called behemoth, thought to be the
hippopotamus (Job 40:15). That’s Hebrew, but big animals tend to have B names in English
also: bull, bear, buck, boar, buffalo, bison, bronco. Australians call big male kangaroos boomers,
and elephants are known to circus people as bulls. I had an elephant named Babe as a child,
and the big blue ox of the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan was named Babe too.
Paul Bunyan was a giant himself, of course, and it’s very common for fictional B
characters like him to be oversized. Watching TV one afternoon a few years ago, I suddenly
noticed a fat cartoon lady called “Aunt Bertha,” and then a few minutes later in a different
cartoon, a huge wrestler called “Lardo, the Belgian Behemoth.” I knew I was on to
something. Eventually, though, it became clear that B’s “body” and “bottom” connection
concerns “animality” as much as “size.” The bottom is the most prominent part of the body;
and popular speech often equates it with the entire body: save your butt, get your butt over
here. But it’s also the least civilized part of the body: part sexual lure, part outlet of the
digestive system, the last stop of the unlovely process that begins with burps and winds
through bellies and bowels. We can’t disown it, all that sexual and digestive stuff, but we can
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1 John Lawler, “Women, Men, and Bristly Things: The Phonosemantics of the BR- Assonance in English,”
Michigan Working Papers in Linguistics, Winter 1990, reprinted 1992 in The Joy of Grammar: A Festschrift for James
McCawley, ed. G. Larsen et al. (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins). For more on B, see Margaret Magnus’s book Gods of the
Word: Archetypes in the Consonants (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson Univ. Press, 1999), especially the
Introduction and pp. 52 and 87-93.
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