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BRIGHT BEARD

9/4/2019

5 Comments

 
On page 22 of Kurt Vonnegut's darkly whimsical novel Breakfast of Champions, he claims that the word beaver meaning "vagina" originated among news photographers, who used it as a code word to tell other men that you could see up a woman's skirt from that angle. I don't know where he got that from, but I can't find any sources on that. The euphemism seems to trace back to 1910s British slang, when it referred to a man's beard. By 1927, due to the visual similarity, the definition got extended to female genitalia. The "beard" meaning emerged because of a resemblance to beaver pelts, and that word goes back to Old English beofor. Even earlier, beofor is from (through Proto-Germanic) the Proto-Indo-European root bher, meaning "bright" or "brown". Usage of beaver in language over time peaked in the 1850s, and the Vonnegutian definition is, in conclusion, erroneous.
5 Comments
Mark Ashford
1/25/2021 06:58:40 am

Beaver = vagina?
Where do people get such ridiculous ideas from? It has nothing whatsoever to do with the vagina!

Beaver refers to the hairy female pudenda, as is quite obvious if a moment's thought is applied.

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Barry bipka
5/23/2021 11:58:38 pm

Huh?

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Bennie. Bipka
5/24/2021 12:00:21 am

Wha?

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Jerdog
11/3/2021 06:37:48 am

Duh. beaver-fur. woman’s pubic hair above the vagina- fur hence beaver

Berry McKockoner
8/16/2022 11:41:53 pm

U a Beaver. Fuck u gonna do abt it Mark.

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
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