Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/31/can-you-see-the-penis-characte.html
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Hmmm. Our definitions of “penis” may differ…
(stupid chrome)
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Yes, but was it hard to carve?
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This sentence is full of win.
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There are a number of jokes I would like to make here, but I will refrain from doing so.
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Too hard to grab just one?
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Heiroglyph for ■■■■■.
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This is in fact a penis, yes. It represents the biliteral root mt. It is used to spell words like mt, “muscle” and mwt, “mother” and smt, “hear.” The symbol in the middle is a ligature between this sign and s. You might use it (although I’m not sure – there are a billion rules and I’m an amateur) to write smt “hear” in shorthand, as it were. (Ancient Egyptian had no dedicated way to write vowels, so by convention vowels are either not written or are written as “e.” You’ll sometimes hear that we don’t know the vowels, but that’s nonsense: we can work almost all of them out through regular sound changes from Coptic. It’s just most Egyptologists, interested in reading rather than speaking the language, can’t be bothered.) (If you write this hieroglyph alone, with a stroke under it, and follow it with, I believe, the flesh determiner, then you’ve written the word “penis” in Middle Egyptian. Useful for your Tinder and Grinder apps)
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but are there any yonic glyphs? turnabout is fair play
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I believe I have cracked the code!
These glyphs represent… penis!
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Can’t see them with latest Firefox on my puter.
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I’m running unupdatable Firefox 48.0.2 and see naughty things.
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I cannot actually work out what the middle one is meant to be doing, to be honest. Looks painful.
Croquet.
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It looks (at least, to my layman’s eyes) like a variation on a hieroglyph found on a mural in the tomb of Ti, c. 2300 BC. The mural depicts a battle between two groups of fishermen, and the hieroglyph records an insult being hurled by one combatant at his opponent. It would seem the curved line is a rudimentary vulva, and the hieroglyph is usually translated, somewhat primly, as “Come here, you copulator”: in his book Scorn: With Added Vitriol (where I learned all of this), Matthew Parris prefers the earthier “Come 'ere, you fucker.”
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From the Gardiner Sign List
All of this kerfuffle reminds me of when the Communications Decency Act was passed, my father wrote a long essay explaining all sorts of Academic Freedoms that would be abridged in support of decency. He cited secret Mark as an example. But ,in this case, it is the very form, and not just the content that is imperiled by bluenosed busybodies.
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I see what you did there, and I like it!
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I just see blocks, don’t have the correct font for hieroglyphs in the latest firefox apparently. Where can I get it?
ETA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_block) this shows all the glyphs for me except the three in question… does firefox censor this? I don’t get it.
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