Fun Fact

I've found English Departments are obsessed with eunuchs; you do the math.  For one thing, "eunuchs" provide a great image for theorists to use, especially queer theorists.  I've noticed, though, one thing that's never talked about is the peculiarly Darwinian adaptation begun to be seen sometime after the reign of Justinian (527-565 CE): eunuchs with the gene for exceptionally large tongues gradually won the adaptive battle over short-tongued eunuchs.  Some of these specimens have been documented as having tongues that extended all the way down to their navels; in fact, it's now believed that wattles were first developed as interior "carrying-cases," as it were, for these exceptionally long tongues.  In Yeats' famous poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," scholars now believe the "small cabin" of "clay and wattles made" actually refers to the poet's mouth, in which is hidden an enormous love-tongue, made of "immortal" gold, yet highly flexible, which the poet offers to the beloved, presumably Maud Gonne, in lieu of normal-sized penis.  More recently, several political commentators have postulated that the fixed expression on First Lady Pat Nixon's face was actually one of sexual daze, the result of nightly assaults by her husband, Dick, who stored an enormous stubbled "lingual licker" in his valise-sized wattles.  There has even been recent speculation, I believe by Dickinson theorists associated with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that Mabel Loomis Todd might have altered the spelling of a line of Dickinson's poetry that originally read, "I taste a licker never brewed," to short-circuit unwanted conjecture about "Master wattles" that referred  to the recipient of several important Dickinson letters.  In any case, much recent scholarship has thrown new light on eunuch-use; and indeed, the phrase "speaking in tongues" may have originally designated, not evangelical exuberance or the offerings of castrati choirs, but the rapturous outbursts of women behind the purdah, who availed themselves of the talents of these long-tongued eunuchs for the purposes of vaginal and anal cleansing.  In fact, it turns out that our contemporary word, "colon," most likely descends from the name of a particularly famous long-tongued eunuch named Colnn, whose legendary tongue was apparently so sensitive it could detect polyps in routine tests not unlike our own colorectal exams!