SPECIAL WORDS FOR SEX AND RELATIONSHIP 207 



This is certainly true of Old Saxon fddian, which is 

 used in the sense of bear, produce, in the Heliand. 

 O.N. foefta is procreate, as well as bring forth ; and 

 Swedish foda, Danish fode, are both to nourish and 

 to bring forth. In such words there appears to be a fossil 

 of an old meaning of the pd series, namely, to feed or 

 fill in a sexual sense a conception retained by Milton 

 in the lines : 



Zephyr with Aurora playing, 

 As he met her once a-maying, 

 There on beds of violets blue, 

 And fresh-blown roses washed in dew, 

 Filled her with thee a daughter fair, 

 So buxom, blithe, and debonair. 



Or, by Shakespeare, 1 when he writes in Measure for 

 Measure : 



Your brother and his lover have embraced : 

 As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time 

 That from the seedness the bare fallow brings 

 To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb 

 Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. 



If we take the primitive sense of pd to be fill, we see 

 how the notion of pabulum, fodder, and the conception 

 of father as fyvrwp arises. There is still a further series 

 of words to be noted. Most of the German writers 

 identify vuoter, food, and vuoter in the sense of fatter al, 

 sheath, case, in other words, the ' fill ' and the filled. 

 Now the Gothic fodr is sheath, vagina; O.H.G. fotar, 

 fddar, A.S. fodder are theca, envelope, sheath. Medi- 

 aeval Latin fodrus, Italian fodero, are both occasionally 



1 In an allied sense when he makes Adriana complain in the Comedy of 

 Errors that her husband "breaks the pale and feeds from home." 



