Joe Ciccone - The ElectroLounge

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the old p-is-for-mouth didn’t mean anything to the Greeks, who had their own words for
mouth. But their new candy cane looked a bit phallic, and the Greeks did have two p words
for ‘penis’, peos and posthe. 11 Why not redraw the letter to match In Athens the candy cane
became a tall cylinder ∏. Out west it became a cock-and-balls P. That suited the Romans too,
because they had their own p-word penis. And of course it still works for us—and we’re so fond
of its shape that we recycle it in the four small letters q, p, d, b! As a culture, we’re far too proper
to admit that we might have a penis in our alphabet, but every once in a while somebody
notices the resemblance and brings it to light. For example, the old porn ad I’ve sketched in
Fig. 1 cleverly turns the capital P’s hole into an anatomically correct echo of the letter itself.
Figure 1
Do other alphabets have penises in them Yes. The Hebrew name for Z, zayin,
originally meant ‘sword’, but nowadays it’s Israeli slang for ‘penis’. The Hebrew letter is written
which can look like either object if you squint really hard. But I was thinking more of ‏,ז
Egyptian hieroglyphics, which employed two unmistakable cock-and-balls symbols that Sir
Alan Gardiner’s standard sign list designates as D52 and D53. 12 In Fig. 2 we see hieroglyph
D52, which the Egyptians used to write their words for male creatures like men and bulls. D53
is the same except that it shows a drop of liquid coming out of the tip; this was used in the
words for urinating, ejaculating, and screwing—and also for the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘in
front of’, like Latin pre‐ and pro-. It’s not entirely clear how D52 and D53 were pronounced,
but neither of them seem to have been p words, except in their shapes and meanings.
Figure 2
With that in mind, let’s turn to the world’s other great system of picture-writing, the
Chinese. It would be too much to hope that the Chinese words for ‘penis’ would be ping or
pao, or that they would be written as neat little towers like the Greek pi ∏. And they aren’t. But
we do meet some old friends among the real Chinese words. You may have noticed how many
non-P Western words like dong have D or sL onsets (alveolar and therefore ‘linear’) and/or
The Cenacle | 84 | April 2013