“He had three sons, called Dogpenis, Dogpenis and Dogpenis”
Sanskrit translation class. My lecturer had a good deadpan, and the flatness of his voice told me he’d been looking forward to reading this line for a while.
He accepted that his translation might not be 100% clear-cut — maybe one or two of them might be called dog tail, not dog penis? But surely dogpenis makes more sense than dogtail as the name of your firstborn? Right? Right?
Um. His argument was that humiliating names are lucky. If some bad spirit meets you, it’ll decide that you’ve suffered enough and not do anything worse to you. If I were Dogpenis, i’d find that pretty unconvincing. But it does seem to be a thing people do, in India and elsewhere, for exactly that reason. And it’s not like ‘Dogtail’ is a name you’d want to go through life with either.
Then again, the source is a story about how the father sells one of his sons as a human sacrifice. So possibly giving his sons degrading names wasn’t a cunning strategy to protect them from cruel fate. Maybe dad was just an asshole.
( The passage is Aitareya Brahmana 7.15. The 3 names are Śunaḥpuccha, Śunaḥśepa, and Śunolāṅgūla. Śunaḥśepa is the only one of importance in the story, and also the one whose name looks most like dog-penis. And yes, I did just spend far too long tracking this down)