35To confound his putative critic, the author produces four impeccably classical proverbs, each of which consists of the words ʿalā ẓalʿika “regarding thy limping” preceded by an imperative verb: irbaʿ ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Restrain thyself because of thy limping,” i.e., “Do not overreach yourself”), irqa ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Ascend thou the mountain with knowledge as to thy limping,” i.e., “Do not make idle threats”), irqaʾ ʿalā ẓalʿika (apparently meaning “Be gentle with thyself, and impose not upon thyself more than thou art able to perform… or abstain thou, for I know thine evil qualities or actions… or… rectify thou, or rightly dispose, first thy case, or thine affair”), and qi ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Be cautious as to thy limping,” i.e., “If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones”) (see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. ẓalaʿa).
36“Another of Khurāfah’s tales, Umm ʿAmr!” (Ḥadīthu Khurāfah yā Umma ʿAmr): Khurāfah was a man of the tribe of ʿUdhrah who claimed to have been carried off by the jinn but whose tales of which were, on his return, dismissed as lies; thus khurāfāt has come to mean in modern usage “superstitions, fables, fairy stories.” Umm ʿAmr (“Mother of ʿAmr”) is an epithet of the hyena; her frequent apostrophization in proverbs and anecdotes appears to be related to the conventional view of the hyena as “the stupidest of beasts” (see al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 1:160); thus the sense is something like “It’s all a pack of lies, you imbecile!”
37abīlīn, pl. of abīl, “one who beats the nāqūs,” a plank beaten with rods to summon Christians to prayer.
38“the Great Catholicos” (al-jāthilīq al-akbar): the leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians living under Muslim rule.
39“the Supreme Pontiff” (al-ʿasaṭūs al-aʿẓam): the Pope of Rome.
40“Ascribing partners to God” (al-shirk): i.e., polytheism.
41“pronounce letters like Qurʾān readers” (tuqalqilūn): qalqalah is “a quality unique to recitation [consisting of] the insertion of [ǝ] (schwa) after syllable-final [q], [d], [ṭ], [b], and [j]” (Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qurʾan (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001), 22). Such a pronunciation would sound bizarre in non-Qurʾanic contexts.
42“falter” (taḥṣarūn): the repetition is the author’s.
43“tightened” (mufarram): cf. the Qāmūs, “al-farm… is a medicament with which a woman becomes narrower” and Lane, Lexicon, “farama… to constrict the vulva with raisin stones.”
44“in two different forms” (al-ʿakhtham wa-l-khathīm): while the second word reads in the text wa-l-khashīm, this word, which is not found in the lexica, must be a misprint for wa-l-khathīm, which the Qāmūs gives as a synonym of the former.
45“the just plain large one” (al-ʿumāriṭī): defined in the Qāmūs as farj al-marʾah al-ʿaẓīm (“a woman’s large vagina”).
46“the buttocks but with a slightly different spelling” (al-būṣ): the author has already used al-bawṣ above; the Qāmūs gives both spellings.
47al-ḥāriqah: literally “the woman who rubs, or burns.” The Qāmūs gives other possibly appropriate meanings, such as “the woman who is so overcome by lust that she grinds her teeth one upon another out of fear lest that lust take her to the point of neighing and snorting.”
48“the woman whose vagina is wide open and the woman whose vagina is open wide” (al-khijām wa-l-khajūm): according to the Qāmūs, the two forms are synonymous.
49“the woman with the tiny vagina a man can’t get at (again, but a different word)” (al-marfūghah): cf. twenty-one items earlier (al-marṣūfah).
50al-maṣūṣ: also (the Qāmūs), the “vagina that dries the liquid from the surface of the penis.”
51al-bayẓ: also (the Qāmūs) “the water of the woman or man.”
52“the clitoris said with a funny accent” (al-ʿuntul): “the clitoris (baẓr); a dialectal variant of ʿunbul” (Qāmūs).
53“a man’s practicing coitus with one woman and then another before ejaculating and a man’s practicing coition with one woman and then another before ejaculating” (al-fahr wa-l-ifhār): the Qāmūs states that these two verbal forms from the same root are synonymous.
54“a little-used word for plain copulation” (al-nashnashah): defined in the Qāmūs simply as nikāḥ (“copulation”).
55“a noun meaning copulation from which no verb is formed” (al-ʿaṣd): the definition in the Qāmūs runs al-nikāḥ lā fiʿla lahu.
56“dashing water on one’s vagina”: the next word in the text—al-ʿaṣd—has occurred eight items earlier (see n. 55); here the author may have intended al-ʿazd, which is synonymous with the former (though it has a verbal form).
57“the flesh of the inner part of the vulva” (al-kayn): this is followed in the text by al-ṭuʾṭuʾah, for which no meaning has been found.
58“the vulva said four other ways”: the author supplies four more items (bizbāz, fāʿūsa, khurnūf, mashraḥ) that the Qāmūs defines simply with the words farj and ḥir (“vagina” and “vulva”).
59“the flabby vagina”: in the text al-ghuḍāriṭī, which is not to be found in the Qāmūs (or other dictionaries) and is probably a misprint for al-ʿuḍāriṭī, in which case it is a repeat from above; this possibility seems stronger, given that the following word is also a repeat (see the following note).
60“the vagina that dries the liquid from the surface of the penis” (al-maṣūṣ): a repeat from above where, however, the second sense given in the Qāmūs seems more appropriate.
61“another name for the vagina” (al-ṭanbarīz): defined in the Qāmūs simply as farj al-marʾah (“a woman’s vagina”).
62“the bizarrely spelled” (al-khafashanfal): the word, defined simply as “a woman’s vagina,” is of a particularly unusual form and without related words that might throw further light on its meaning.
63“the ‘nock’” (al-fūq): after the notch in the end of the arrow that fits the bowstring.