Note 117 — TAKE TIME BY THE FORELOCK.116

“The text has a play upon words,” says the translator, “which could be translated if the French words had the same meaning as the Latin:—Dixit (puella) se non amplius dolere caput. Tum ille: ‘At ego nunc doleo caudam.’ (The girl said that she no longer had a pain in the head. Said the husband: ‘But I have a pain in my tail.’)” This note, we must confess, is a source of some mystification to us, since the relationship between the French and Latin words is both simple and direct. Cauda, of course, is the Latin word for tail: in the erotic sense it designates the penis. (C.f. Blondeau: Dictionnaire érotique latin-française: Liseux: Paris, 1885.) The Italians use the word coda in a similar sense. Tail, in French, is queue; in erotic literature it is also a highly common term for the membrum virile. (C.f. Landes: Glossaire érotique de la langue française, and Farmer: Slang and its Analogues.) Again, in English, tail is a slang synonym either for the penis or the female pudendum. C.f. Farmer: Slang and its Analogues, who gives numerous examples of the use of the word in this sense. We append a few of his quotations:—(1) Chaucer, Cant. Tales, 6047-8: “For al so siker as cold engendreth hayl, A likerous mouth must han a likerous TAYL.” (2) Rochester, Poems: “Then pulling out the rector of the females, Nine times he bath’d him in their piping tails.” (3) Motteux, Rabelais, V., xxi.: “They were pulling and hauling the man like mad, telling him that it is the most grievous ... thing in nature for the TAIL to be on fire....”