Joe Ciccone - The ElectroLounge

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we know they’re phallic.
P boasts a big armory of ‘weapons’: spears and their long-handled cousins pikes,
spontoons, partisans, and pole-axes, as well as various knives and daggers: puncheon, poniard,
spud, pen-knife, pocket-knife. The ancient Roman sword called a spatha became the slim épée
used by modern fencers, and the Roman pilum ‘javelin’ turned into the modern German Pfeil
‘arrow’. Yet not every sharp P object is a weapon. Garden sheds bristle with its ‘sharp tools’:
pegs, spikes, spits, prongs; plus pickets and palings for fences; spades, picks, and plows for breaking
ground, prods and spurs for handling animals, and peaveys and pokers for handling logs.
All these tools and weapons being named for penises—isn’t that a bit much to claim
Shall we ask Sigmund Freud Doctor, would you please compare the examples above to the
unconscious visual symbols that represent phalluses in people’s dreams Certainly: “The male
genital organ is symbolically represented in dreams in many different ways. . . . Its more
conspicuous and, to both sexes, more interesting part, the penis, is symbolized primarily by
objects which resemble it in form, being long and upstanding, such as sticks, umbrellas, poles,
trees and the like; also by objects which . . . have the property of penetrating, and consequently
of injuring, the body,—that is to say, pointed weapons of all sorts: knives, daggers, lances, sabres;
fire-arms are similarly used: guns, pistols and revolvers, these last being a very appropriate symbol
on account of their [P-like] shape. . . . [The meaning of] objects from which water flows is
again easily comprehensible: taps, water-cans, or springs; [and likewise of many tools:] Pencils,
pen-holders, nail-files, hammers, and other implements are undoubtedly male sexual symbols.” 4
It’s not just nouns that betray this imagery. Verbs, adjectives, and prefixes do their part
too. Their meanings often cluster around a secondary archetype of one particular weapon—a
weapon that our ancestors were making and throwing half a million years ago, the Spear. What
are two things you’d notice about a spear, aside from its shape That it’s sharp, and it’s fast. In
other words, spears are spiky and speedy. Different languages weight these qualities differently.
Spanish for ‘speed’ is prisa, and ‘fast’ is presto or pronto. Stinging-hot food is picante, like insects’
sharp little stings (picaduras). English pretty is a ‘sharp’ word too. For centuries, pretty usually
meant ‘sharp-witted’ (“a pretty fellow”) or ‘requiring sharp wits to solve’ (“a pretty paradox”),
until those meanings were crowded out by the modern sense of ‘sharp-looking, attractive’ (“a
pretty girl”). The word’s basic sense of ‘sharply or distinctly’ is also apparent in the adverb
(“pretty rare”), except when its point is blunted by over-use (“pretty good”).
Spear qualities are even more obvious in P verbs. Most English verbs for ‘put in’
begin with P, for example, both simple ones like prick, poke, press, pierce, plunge, puncture,
penetrate, and more specialized ones like perforate, punch, probe, and pry—including the visual
prying of peer, peek, spectate, spy. (A person who “pokes his nose” into other people’s business is
a Nosy Parker or Paul Pry.) In fact, it’s all but impossible to talk about any sort of ‘puncturing’
without using P words: that’s how completely the letter owns this idea. It’s a spear idea, of
course, because well-thrown spears literally ‘go through’ their targets. ‘Go through’ is the literal
meaning of per- in pervade and permeate. ‘Go through’ was also the literal meaning of prassein,
the Greek verb for ‘do or achieve’ and the source of two words we still use for people who can
finish or “go through with” the things they plan: pragmatic and practical. And look at all our
short P verbs for different kinds of ‘constructive action’: ply a trade and plug away at it; plow
and plant, play, please, prove, praise, prop up, prep and prime, plan, pray, plead, pledge. All of these
distantly evoke the flight of a well-thrown spear, our oldest metaphor for successful effort.
The metaphor gains clarity when we realize that a spear is a projectile—that is,
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The Cenacle | 84 | April 2013