Quote:
Originally posted by ltl/fb
I still want an answer to my "PENis" "PENetration" question.
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It appears they are not related. "Penetrate" comes from
penetro/penetrare - [to put into; to pass through or into, to penetrate]; while "penis" comes from (who would have guessed)
penis - [a tail]. Young Latin students often titter at learning the word
pinus, which means pine tree and is a poetic trope for anything made of pine. But no relation. There's a famous passage in Pliny the Elder's eyewitness account of the Vesuvius eruption of 79 C.E. in which he likens the cloud to a
pinus, but anyone who's been to Tuscany or Umbria knows that Italian pines look more like mushrooms (and therefore mushroom clouds) than American species, which look somewhat more like a penis.
The analogy to a tail breaks down in the more poetical naming of the vagina/vaginae (pronounced "wa-gee-nah" in Classical pronunciation, for those of you into getting your dirty talk exactly right), which is the word for sheath or scabbard --- home base for the mighty sword, as it were.
