clitoris

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

>Date:         Fri, 17 Sep 1993 13:09:00 EDT
>From: Art Protin <protin%USL.COM@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>

>Folks,
>    On the subject topic, I agree with jimc on:

>>> Should I make pinji gender-neutral?
>>
>> This is Politically Correct, and is in line with historical trends
>> in Lojban/Loglan.  I vote yes.

>But, I am not at all convinced about the rest of it.
>>                                 But you're right, it will be hard to
>> write the dictionary entry in English or any natural language.

>If I understand the term pinji it means

>   - A genital protrusion with extreme amounts of nerves and
>     sensors.  When unmodified it refers to the penis, the
>     clitoris, or other organ depending on both gender and
>     species of the owner of said organ.

Hrm.  That's okay, so far as it goes, I guess, but that means we have to be
more specific than we were before.  After all, when {pinji} just meant
"penis", that could mean "the organ housing the external end of the
urethra" (cf. Esperanto slang "pisilo").  Now, about this nerve-packed
quality....  I don't know for sure about the sensations involved in most of
these animals, but I don't know for sure if all of them necessarily get
stimulated the same way...  The third arm from the right on an octopus.
That's the one the male inserts into the female; it's got a groove down the
side in which the sperm-packets travel.  Is that a pinji?  What about the
hemipenes of some snakes?  Or the huge (relative to body-size) penis of the
barnacle?  Or you could get strange and deal with some microbe that
undergoes conjugation by means of a pseudopod or something (and not joining
side-by-side like paramecia).  Is that pseudopod a pinji?  I suppose these
things aren't {pinji}, since they're just organs for the transfer of
genetic material, and should be called by a lujvo expressing that.  Is this
what we want?  Maybe.

~mark