Porcelain Pigs

The close relationship between porcelain and pork is both funny and R-rated, so be prepared. As one might guess, the porc- root in Latin meant “pig” (pork, porcine, porcupine (spiny pig), porpoise (pig fish), Portia, etc.), so that porcus (masculine) was boar and porca (feminine) was sow. (If your name is Portia and that last sentence raised your blood pressure, the name Portia, spelled that way, is from Shakespeare. Before The Merchant of Venice , it was “Porcia”, the feminine form of the aristocratic Roman Porcius gens. For example, the statesman Cato was Marcus Porcius Cato, his sister was known as Porcia the Elder, and the family name definitely referred to pigs. I don’t know if Porky Pig had a famous Roman ancestor or not.)

In addition to the literal meaning, porca was Latin street slang for a prostitute; calling a woman a pig hasn’t gotten less insulting in the last two thousand years. From that usage, another word was formed — porcella is literally “little pig”, but it was very vulgar slang for the external female genitalia. Porcella translates into modern English, with the same degree of vulgarity, as “cunt”. It is a double dirty pun in Latin, actually. Not only would the Romans have laughed at the relationship to “porca”, but Latin purca means slot or trench! It’s the source of English “furrow” — see the discussion of Grimm’s Law below if you don’t believe it — and some scholars even think this root is the ultimate source of Latin porc-, from the sense “to live in a trench, to wallow.”

It is difficult to believe, but from porcella the obscenity there is only one more step to the tableware. If you look up “porcella” in most dictionaries you will get a reference to the porcella sea shell, which is a kind of cowrie shell. It was named for its shape — a slot down the center with lips furled over — by some dirty-minded beachcomber, and porcelain was later so-called from looking like the smooth white surface of the shell. Here’s a good photo of a cowrie, demonstrating both shape and surface texture. The cowrie’s appearance also causes it to be known, somewhat more delicately, as the “Venus Shell”. The scientific name of the species is Cypræa, a reference to Venus again. As mentioned elsewhere, Cyprian can mean resident of Cyprus, worshiper of Venus, or prostitute. “Cowrie” itself is Hindi.

The Romans had yet another dirty pun involving female pigs and female organs. Latin scrofa was another word for “sow”, and the disease scrofula was once thought to be caused by pigs. There was a perceived connection to Latin scrobis, which meant both “hole” and the female genitals. All the senses of screw, mechanical and sexual, come from this pair of words. The mechanical screw was once the internal or “female” threaded portion, now called a nut, not the external “male” thread now called a bolt or screw. In French, the nut is an ecrou. (Engineers have always used “male” and “female” to refer to plugs and receptacles in general, electrical appliances being the most common.) Scroll is another derivative — fine parchment was once made from the uterine membrane of sheep or cows. (Matriculate also comes from this sense; matricula meant high-quality parchment for diplomas and the like, and that’s a diminutive of matrix, i.e., womb.) To bring this discussion full circle, the old Spanish word for a mechanical nut was puerca! (Modern Spanish spells it tuerca.)

The perceived connection between scrofa and scrobis was definitely real — the Indo-European sker- meant to cut, while skep- meant to hack or scrape. The hogs were so-called from their rooting. Cf. the possible connection between porc and purc mentioned earlier. See the section on short and score for many more relatives of sker-. Other English relatives of skep- are shave, shape, scoop, and scab. Latin scapula is the medical name of the shoulder blade, named because animal scapulae were used as scrapers.

One last comment. It is rather funny to watch some dictionaries try to squirm out of the indelicate derivations of porcelain and screw. I’ve seen at least three that solemnly “explain” that the porcella shell is so-named because it looks like the curve of a sow’s back, and these editors can be counted on to assure their gentle readers that screw is related to scrofa via the pig’s curly tail.