I was never the mom who used cutesy names for body parts and bodily functions — no nicknames for the penis or vagina; no slang for using the bathroom or passing gas (as you should already know from last week’s post). I was raised to use clinical terms, and that’s how I raised my boys, too.
SIDE NOTE:
My youngest couldn’t pronounce the word vagina until he was about 4 or 5, thanks to a short frenulum and subsequent speech impediment that needed to be corrected surgically. When he said vagina (which was more often than you may think for a kid that young), it sounded like China. He’d proudly tell people that ‘”Babies came from China,” so in a way, I guess that was his own type of slang.
Now that my boys are mostly grown, I’m pretty sure they use more colloquial phrases when hanging out with their friends. After all, their generation has a whole language (some of it I still don’t understand). Thankfully, none of it is overly offensive — at least not what’s said around me.
Last week, this clip from QI, a comedy quiz show on BBC, came up in my TikTok feed (watch below):
I had never heard the phrase Jack and Danny before, so of course I had to Google it. Apparently, it’s British slang for vagina. More accurately, it’s cockney lingo (used by people from East London) for fanny, which is interchangeable with the more graphic furry cup or the more crass pussy.
Admittedly, this clip made me laugh, but my subsequent Google search didn’t. I won’t even touch the phrase furry cup (gross), but pussy … Ugh! Are we still using this vulgar term?
A few years ago, I wrote a post called, My Vagina Monologue, where I boldly declared to take the meaning of that word back and return it to its more chaste usage. Apparently, I have failed in my quest.
Personally, I still prefer the clinical over the colloquial when referring to female (and male) genitalia. Jack and Danny isn’t particularly offensive, but unless you’re British, please don’t add this phrase to your everyday vernacular. It’s not cute. (And as an aside, stop saying “across the pond” to refer to England’s location; it’s pretentious.)
There’s nothing offensive about the word vagina. Besides, many of the dirty words for it really refer to other parts of the female genital organs, like the vulva or labia. If you’re going to be rude, at least get the anatomy right.
[BTW, if you want to explore the evolution of the word and its various meanings, I found this article on Medium interesting.]
-LJDT
