I have a cat named Zebulon, who I usually call Zeb or Zebbie. Someone told me yesterday that “zebbie” is Arabic for penis. Do I need to start watching what I call my cat?
This is mostly a so what, since I have to assume you got the name Zebulon from Jacob’s son in the old testament. In Hebrew that name means “dwelling place,” although some sites give it as dwelling of honor, with the connotation of honored or exalted.
Zeb, oddly, is more often a shortening of Zebediah instead, father of the apostles James and John, and that comes from the Hebrew for “gift of Jehovah”.
I’ve got to assume that the number of people in this country who would make a biblical connection with Zeb or Zebbie is about a million times as large as those who know Arabic street slang.
[signed]
Dick Johnson
I’m not truly concerned about it – I just wondered if he was pulling my leg or not.
Thanks for the link, Astroboy – what with transliteration and all, I didn’t even bother to try to Google.
Similar situation with my family’s pet Shih-Tzu when I was a kid. My Mom named him Chin-Chin, which I discovered (long after the dog had died) is Japanese slang for penis.
I imagine you pronounce it “Zeh-Bee”, IIRC the Arabic pronounciation is “Zee-Bee”
As in:
“Tele ha zebee”
Revtim:
I’ll bet the story of the Three Little Pigs was never the same for you after that.
Isn’t chin-chin a toast in Italian? Must make for some riotous international banquets.
This is the best!
I’m so using that from now on.
In Modern Standard Arabic, zubb means ‘penis’ and the suffix --i means ‘my’. So zubbi would mean ‘my penis’. Unfortunately, no one actually speaks Modern Standard Arabic, except in formal situations. The colloquial pronunciations are all over the place. In many dialects there is a shift from /u/ > /i/, so that it would be pronounced more like “zibbi.” In Arabic, there is no distinction between short i and short e, they tend to hear them as the same vowel. So… yeah. Zebby could come across sounding like ‘my penis’ depending on the dialect of the hearer.
No nobody speaks Arabic. They are all faking it. After I leave, they switch from “Arabic” (there is not such thing), back to the natural language of man, English.
The problem is that Arabic confuses our difference between “B” and “P.” “Pepsi” becomes “Bebsi” for example. So out word “zipper” has many comic connotations MSA.
Thanks, Paul and Johanna. It’s a tossup which of you was more helpful. 
But is this the primary/only meaning of the word, such that it’s what an Arabic speaker would assume you’re saying?
I mean, “Dick”, “Willie” and “Rod” could all be described as English slang for a certain object, but in general English speakers hearing an animal addressed with any of those words would understand it as a valid nickname.
It’s the primary meaning of the word زبّ although my dictionary tells me it’s also a homonym of the plural form of the adjective azabb, meaning ‘hairy shaggy, hirsute ones’. Hmm… that does have a certain logic to it, doesn’t it… Also a close relative of the word zabib ‘raisins’.
Never mind banquets, it’s a common enough bar toast here. Someone, a woman no less, chimed in with it last night (in Japan, it’s traditional to toast before you have the first drink, or when someone new joins the table).