Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my recent tortellini posting (on the 4th, “I say it sounds yucky and I say the hell with it”), I quoted from the Wikipedia article:

Tortellini [and their larger versions tortelloni] are ring-shaped pasta, sometimes also described as “navel shaped”, hence their alternative name of “belly button” (ombelico).

Now metaphoric navels (informally, belly buttons) have come up on this blog before, in a 10/26/10 posting “The counterpart of phallic symbol”:

Chicken vegetable tortellini soup

where I suggest the term omphalic symbol (the navel, metaphorically extendable to a sexcavital symbol), an analogy you can appreciate by studying the tortellini in the soup above.

This entry was posted on December 6, 2017 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Language and food, Language and the body, Signs and symbols, Vaginality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.