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Porcelain. Such a snooty, upperclass term, with a drawn-out, sybaritic sibilance in the middle of the word that almost demands a sneering utterance. Too bad the term porcelain derives from a vulgar Italian word that meant ‘external female genitals.’ Porcelain is a word whose wide European dispersion we owe directly to its use by Marco Polo in 1298 CE. The Venetian trader (1254 – 1324 CE) and traveler to the Far East wrote or dictated his book Il Milione ‘the million,’ better known as The Travels of Marco Polo, and in it is the earliest recorded use of the word porcellana, in both its meanings, as ‘cowrie shell’ and to name a white, smooth kind of Chinese ceramic ware he had found during his travels. Polo thought the lovely nacreous sheen of porcelain’s glaze resembled the mother-of-pearl-like shine of a cowrie shell.
A cowrie is a univalvular mollusk, a gastropod.
nacre or mother-of-pearl The popularity of Marco Polo’s book cannot be exaggerated. It was one of the first secular bestsellers published. Christopher Columbus himself took an annotated copy of an edition in Latin on his voyage across the Atlantic to find China. Columbus’ copy of Marco Polo’s travel book has survived. Part of one page with Columbus’ actual scribbled marginalia, in Latin, is seen below.
The Italian word for cowrie shell, porcellana, derives from Medieval Italian porcello literally ‘little pig’ but far more usually used as a contemptuous word for vulva, a word that harked back to the rough Latin Soldiers’ Slang porcus literally ‘domestic pig’ but even during Imperial Rome one of the commonest Street Latin terms for vulva. This misogynist aspersion exists still in a vulgar modern English euphemism for the verb fuck. One brutish stud, appraising a passing female, says to another guy, “Check it out. I’d like to pork that.” The fissure in the cowrie shell was supposed to resemble a woman’s vulva. Vulgarisms in every European language exploit this pudendal similarity to anything cleft, including modern English ones like crack and slit.
Porcelain entered English in its Middle French form porcelaine, and daintily dropped its terminal /e/. French too had borrowed this word to describe smooth chinaware from Italian porcellana. Vagina Dentata I think the cowrie shell/vulva parallel recalls a potent folk symbol of male nghtmare, namely, the vagina dentata, Latin ‘toothed vagina.’ Below is a Wikipedia note on it. "Various cultures have folk tales about women with toothed vaginas, frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex with strange women. The vagina dentata appears in the myths of several cultures. Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which “A fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman.” The myth expresses the threat sexual intercourse poses for men who, although entering triumphantly, always leave diminished. The vagina dentata has proven a captivating image for many artists and writers, particularly among surrealist or psychoanalytic works. Although the myth is associated with the fear of castration, it is often falsely attributed to Sigmund Freud. Freud never mentions the term in any of his psycho-analytic work because it runs counter to his own ideas about castration. For Freud, the vagina signifies the fear of castration because the young (male) child assumes that women once had a penis that is now absent. The vagina, then, is the result of castration, not the cause of it. Says Siggie. This myth has been popularized recently by its mention in a sequence from Neil Gaiman's bestselling novel American Gods, and by the 2008 film “Teeth”. The anime “Wicked City” and Carlos Fuentes' novel Christopher Unborn both feature female characters with vaginae dentatae. Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash presents a device called the Dentata which is an anti-rape device inserted into the vagina."
And, students of anatomy and words, that’s as deep as we dip this time.
Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman
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