A life in letters: Private parts and bodily functions

The language used in our house in the 1950s for private parts and functions was, I suppose, reflective of middle-class, west-of-Scotland culture. My penis was known not as a ‘willie’, which would have been regarded as crude, but as a ‘streamie man’, by virtue of the fact that the liquid which periodically issued therefrom was not pee, wee, wee-wee or even ‘number 1’ but ‘streamie.’ 

The first word for faeces which I was taught as a baby, I imagine on grounds of ease of utterance was ‘aah-aah’. When my linguistic skills had sufficiently developed to tackle the syllables ‘jobby’ I was assured that this, not poo, not ‘number 2’ was in fact the correct word for the brown stuff, and my bum was thereafter designated my ‘jobby place.’

There was profound disapproval of the ‘fart’ word, as I discovered as a young teenager when, on hearing a car backfiring a few times in the street, I commented with I thought a certain poetic inventiveness that it sure was a ‘cow-farter.’  ‘Don’t ever let me hear you using that word again!’ my mother rebuked me. I can’t remember the family word for ‘letting off’ which suggests it was not much spoken of. My mother, however, referred decorously to having ‘done a pom-pom.’

As a child and young teenager, I had no vocabulary for the mysteries of female anatomy.