The Old and New Testicle

Gonads are testicles and testicles shouldn’t really have anything to do with the Old and New Testaments , but they do.

The Testaments of the Bible testify to God’s truth. This is because the Latin for witness was testis . From that one root, testis , English has inherited pro test (bear witness for), de test (bear witness against), con test (bear witness competitively), and test- icle. What are testicles doing there? They are testi fying to a man’s virility. Do you want to prove that you’re a real man? Well, your testi cles will testi fy in your favour.

That’s the usual explanation, anyway. There’s another, more interesting theory that in bygone days witnesses used to swear to things with their hands on their balls, or even on other people’s balls. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham makes his servant swear not to marry a Canaanite girl. The King James Version has this translation:

I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth

Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek , which means, approximately, soft bits . Nobody knows how oaths were sworn in the ancient world, but many scholars believe that people didn’t put their hands on their hearts or their thighs, but on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing, which would make the connection between testis and testes rather more direct.

Testicles. Bollocks. Balls. Nuts. Cullions. Cojones. Goolies. Tallywags. Twiddle-diddles. Bawbles, trinkets, spermaria. There are a hundred words for the danglers and they get everywhere. It’s enough to make a respectable fellow blush. Do you enjoy the taste of avocado? So did I, until the terrible day when I realised that I was eating Aztec balls. You see, the Aztecs noticed the avocado’s shape and decided that it resembled nothing so much as a big, green bollock. So they called it an ahuakatl , their word for testicle. When the Spanish arrived they misheard this slightly and called it aguacate , and the English changed this slightly to avocado . To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame.

Even if you flee to an ivory tower and sit there wearing an orchid and a scowl, it still means that you have a testicle in your buttonhole, because that’s what an orchid’s root resembles, and orchis was the Greek for testicle. Indeed, the green-winged orchid used to rejoice in the name Fool’s Ballocks . The technical term for somebody who has a lot of balls is a polyorchid .

And it’s very possible that this orb on which we all live comes from the same root as orchid , in which case we are whirling around the Sun on a giant testis, six billion trillion tons of gonad or cod , which is where cod-philosophy , codswallop and codpiece come from.

There are two codpieces at the top right of your computer keyboard, and how they got there is a rather odd story. NHT1FHnUGiVIhIY6FRCfbULwqxuIf+stJXVS9mgUiHa2AJOKIuPXC+UdcBfkvfHZ