Deserving des(s)ert

Being interested in word origins and language in general definitely has pros and cons. It’s good, for example, when you’re reading something boring—then you can entertain yourself once in a while by ruminating on interesting words in the text. It’s bad, on the other hand, when you’re doing this when you actually need to be focusing on the boring stuff, e.g. the exam material. Recently, this has been happening a bit too often to me during my reading for a philosophy class—not that it’s boring, it just tends to become really looooong and tiring. In one of these episodes, I had a 5-minute pause or so reflecting on a title of a chapter in one of my books: “Desert, Entitlement, and Property Rights.” The excursus was just caused by an innocent misunderstanding, namely me connecting “desert” to, say, a chocolate truffle or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I couldn’t quite figure out what that had to do with entitlement and property rights. Of course it’s just a matter of spelling—as you probably know (but I didn’t), the chocolate truffle would be a dessert with two s’s. Even though these words have origins in different verbs in French and ultimately Latin (desert from Old French deservir and dessert from Middle French desservir), they certainly seem very related to me: I always feel like I deserve a dessert...

Penalizing penis in penetration?

Some of those digressions are not so simple and innocent. Recently, I became really alarmed and started psychoanalyzing myself to get to the root of one of my weird etymology theories. When I was reading about criminal justice I stumbled on to the word penal, and I just couldn’t help wondering whether it’s related to penis. I don’t think any of us want to see this part of the male genitals as some penalizing equipment. At this stage I was really worried that my thoughts were in line with Freud’s view that women are naturally submissive to men. The concept of “penis envy” flashed before my eyes. And I didn’t stop there: maybe penal and penis are both related to penetration? It seemed right. When I had calmed myself down, remembering that Freud’s theories were fraud, so to speak, with hardly a grain of scientific truth, I decided that this thinking was of course just natural curiosity on my behalf, and no freaky sex-obsession. I turned to the etymology books in the library and discovered to my relief that these words are indeed not related.

The history of penal is straightforward: borrowed from Middle French peinal, it goes back to Latin peonalis which was derived from poena, “punishment.” This came from Greek poine, and then we’re getting closer to the Proto-Indo-European root: *kwoina.

Penis, on the other hand, has the Proto-Indo-European root *pos-, so it’s not related to penal at all. English penis was first seen in writing in 1676 and was either borrowed from French pénis or directly from Latin penis, which originally meant “tail.” Hmmm. The sexual meaning developed as slang, and later that “penis” meaning gained its right as the standard along with “tail.”

The verb penetrate was borrowed from—surprise!—Latin penetrare, “to put into, to enter into.” It was related to penus, “innermost part of a temple, store or provision of food.” Penetration first appeared in writing in 1605 as “a penetrating or piercing.” As early as 1613 it had acquired the sexual sense.

The more I penetrate (ha ha) into the issue of the genitals, the more fun it becomes since it has been such a taboo throughout history. Languages are constantly developing euphemisms for sex words. In Latin American Spanish, for example, the word pájaro, “bird,” came to mean “male genitals.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the connection there.

Anyway...this has become a little bit too phallocentric (by the way: phallus is borrowed from Greek phallós, “penis,” and is related to phalle which means “whale!”). I’m just going to stop now, so you won’t think I’m a total dickhead...