A.Sklyarenko: (see also my articles "ПОЛУЧИТ ЛИ
БАБУШКА РОЖДЕСТВЕНСКУЮ ОТКРЫТКУ, ИЛИ ОТЧЕГО ЗАГОРЕЛСЯ БАРОНСКИЙ АМБАР В «АДЕ»?"
and "NABOKOV’S ANTHROPOMORPHIC ZOO: THE LEPORINE FAMILY OF DOCTORS
IN ADA"
available
in Zembla). 'Cunilingus' comes from cunnus
and lingua and has nothing to do with rabbits or
doctors.
JM: So we should rule out Condor as suggestive
of a "golden cunnus," and stick to doctors, hares
and rabbits.
btw: After soberly writing down
"cunnus," I decided to check on its gender (it sounded very
masculine!).
Wikipedia on "Latin Profanity" brought me various
surprises. For example, "mentula" (little mind) and variations on the
origins of Ada's wordplay with "on the verge."
I always thought that "a mind of its own" was the title of a
book by David M. Friedman and its use kinda
metaphorical.
The answer I was looking for appeared right in the end of the entry "
In the Romance Languages" Congs to the Portuguese... A quote from Cicero's
letters was exceedingly instructive,
too.
Etymology
Cunnus has a distinguished Indo-European
lineage. It is cognate with Persian kun "anus" and kos "vulva", and with Greek
κύσθος (kusthos). Tucker relates it to Indo-European *kut-nos, which suggests a
word meaning "split" (cf. English crack). The Indo-European origin of this word
is supported by the fact that it appears in the Slavic languages, as in the
Czech kunda also Persian gosha "splitting" and kos "vulva".[citation
needed]
Eric Partridge's Origins, by contrast, relates it to a reconstructed
IE *kuzdhos, and also calls attention to the Hittite kun, "tail", and suggests
cognates among the Afro-Asiatic languages.
Usage
Cicero's
letters[citation needed] confirm once again its obscene status. Cicero
writes:
. . . cum autem nobis non dicitur, sed nobiscum? quia si ita
diceretur, obscaenius concurrerent litterae.
("We don't say cum nobis ["with
us"], but rather nobiscum; if we said it the other way, the letters would run
together in a rather obscene way.")
Because the /m/ of cum assimilates to the
/n/ of nobis, and because the accent was weaker in Latin than in English, cum
nobis (although stressed on the middle syllable) sounds very similar to cunno
bis (stressed on the first syllable), meaning "in/from/with a cunt
twice".
Synonyms and metaphors
These include sinus,
"indentation", and fossa, "ditch".
The modern scientific or polite words
vulva and vagina both stem from Latin, but originally they had different
meanings. The word vagina is the Latin word for scabbard or
sword-sheath.
Vulva (or volva) signifed the uterus. The meanings of vagina
and vulva have changed by means of metaphor and metonymy,
respectively.
In the Romance languages
Cunnus is preserved in
almost every Romance language: e.g. French con, Catalan cony, Spanish coño,
Galician cona, Portuguese cona, (South) Sardinian cunnu, Old Italian cunna. In
Calabrian dialects the forms cunnu (m.) and cunna (f.) are used as synonyms of
"stupid, dumb". In Portuguese it has been transferred to the feminine gender;
the form cunna is also attested in Pompeian graffiti and in some late Latin
texts.