This was a topic of discussion today: Nuts in English vs. huevos (eggs) in Spanish.
Eggs in Russian and Hebrew
Jeez Louise, one response and Hebrew is already covered?! :mad:
Doesn’t the word avocados mean testicles in Mayan or Aztec or something? I’m too lazy to look it up.
Okay, so I looked it up. It’s testicles in Nahuatl.
Eggs in Mandarin
Welsh: eirin “plums” or, sometimes, eirin blewog (hairy plums / peaches). Peaches are usually eirin gwlanog (woolly plums) but can also be eirin blewog.
Eier (eggs) in German as well. Seems to be a common one, though kind of ironic.
It hints both at their shape and their, um, fragility.
“Eier” is the most common, but we also call them “Nüsse” (nuts) sometimes.
Eggs in Hindi too, “ande” or “unde”. (Transliteration is hard and stupid.)
BTW this is why I think it’s sooooo stupid when someone is tough to say they have balls. Balls are weak and fragile.
Catalan: also eggs (ous).
In Spanish sometimes we say that something will be done “because my eggs say so”. I’ve been known to remind a guy who’d claimed we were going to be doing things his way and not mine that “the cock has two eggs but the hen has millions” (and yes, we did do things my way).
Not having balls is meant to say that the guy is a woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fragile nature of the little guys.
My urologist told me that if you were to look at a human testicle in its natural state, it would look something like a boiled egg (without the shell).
Because being a woman is baaaaaaad.
There’s also Rocky Mountain oysters in English - testicles eaten as food, not just a food name for them.
In Norwegian: Occasionally the nuts, but it’s not all that common.
Eiers (eggs) in Afrikaans.
Nuts (noten) in dutch as well.
I believe it was Betty White who said, “Why do people say ‘grow a pair of balls’? Balls hurt like hell when they get hit. People should say ‘grow a vagina’. Those things can really take a pounding!”
No food-related terms for it in Japanese as far as I know.
Sort of related: there are a couple of English words that are derived from testicles:
Avocado: “…originally comes from the Nahuatl word ahuácatl, which means ‘testicle’.”
Orchid: “…comes from the Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), literally meaning ‘testicle’, because of the shape of the root.”