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PURE OR BEAUTIFUL FLOWER

7/15/2020

5 Comments

 
Punani, an often-vulgar slang word for "vagina", originated from the 1980s Jamaican patois term punanny and was popularized through reggae and use on Da Ali G Show. Some think that the term comes from Hawaiian puanani, meaning "beautiful flower" (from pua, "blossom", and nani, "lovely"), but geographically speaking that's hard to buy. It's also been proposed is that it's from poon, another nickname for "vagina" and a shortening of poontang, which is a Haitian Creole corruption of French putain, "prostitute". Putain, through Old French pute, traces to Latin putus, meaning "pure" (this may have been influenced by putidus, "stinking"; also the source of Spanish puta). Finally, that would be from Proto-Indo-European pewh, which meant "to purify". It's often hard to find etymologies for such colloquial words, but both options are fascinating!
5 Comments
Alistair
10/2/2022 09:19:57 am

There's an alternate claim floating around on teh interwebz that this word is actually of Indian origin, and was introduced to Jamaica in the 1930s to 1950s by Indian migrant workers. That claim states that 'punani' is a term used for the female vagina in The Kama Sutra.

While this claim seems plausible, I'd need someone who's read Kama in Hindi to verify. I'm sure you can find a native Hindi speaker in your network to confirm or deny this.

My interest in this comes because I'm from the Caribbean, and old enough to have been a teenager when dancehall music first became popular in the region. It was a/ quite clear at the time that the term was already established in the Jamaican vernacular at the very outset of dancehall's popularity; and b/ it seemed quite feasibly of Indian origin at the time.

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Hawaiian
10/21/2022 11:16:40 pm

Punani is not a translation from Jamaica punanny in anyway it’s the word flower in Hawaiian you clearly don’t know what your writing about

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Goddess
1/11/2023 10:10:48 am

Please use punctuation so folks can understand what you mean?
Thx.

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Goddess
1/11/2023 10:13:20 am

Oh...
and it's YOU'RE, not "your"

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Lola O'Brien
1/13/2023 02:36:46 am

"Geographically speaking that's hard to buy." Cultural exchange between the UK and Hawaii has happened since 1778 despite the geographical distance between the two. https://www.britishempire.co.uk/maproom/hawaii.htm

There's a reason that the Union Jack appears as part of the Hawaiian flag - the royals of Hawaii were very close with the British empire.

Pretty much everyone in Hawaii knows what punani means...and Hawaiians born before the 1980s and Ali G definitely know what it means.

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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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