This is Gabrielė Martirosianaitė, Miss Lithuania 2008. Varpute  not shown.

I’ve been thinking (hat-tip to bellbird, in her comment on the “Victorian clitoris” post, below) about better words for clitoris: who would have a word that sounds like you might want to get your tongue around it?

And I decided: I’m betting on the Lithuanians. Because what a nice name for a language “Lithuanian” is.

Anyway, their word for “clitoris” turns out to be “varputė”. 

Yeah, I think that’s better. 

New Zealand Maori call it “tikana”, and that’s good too. 

In Mandarin, a tasty, tangy language, if you spit out the pips, it’s 花蕊. Which is pronounced huāruĭ. 

But I’m afraid the Hungarians call it csikló, which sounds like a Vietnamese bicycle taxi. And that’s wrong, believe me.