I’m once again afflicted by spam comments — thousands a day — from a source that creates sender names by pairing random names from some gigantic database. Today’s most entertaining combo is Dong Goodwin, a personal name (from a Chinese surname) with inevitable phallic associations in English, plus an OE surname meaning ‘good friend’. So a nice mixture of louche and earnest.
From my 2/18/13 posting “dong”, on the (orig. US) slang dong ‘penis’: OED2 suggests, very tentatively, a connection to Edward Lear’s nonsense verse “The dong with a luminous nose”.
GDoS has it instead as an abbreviation of ding-dong (US) ‘the penis’ (but gives no etymology for that), with its first cite for ding-dong:
1905-07 ‘Old Gingerbread’ in Bawdy N.Y. State MS. n.p.: One hand grasped a knife, and the other my old ding dong, / And off came old gingerbread nine inches long.
Then PADS in 1944 and cites from texts in 1958 and thereafter.
For dong in texts, GDoS antedates OED2’s 1939 (Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), with
c.1890 ‘The Bastard King of England’ in Bold (1979) 23: On Philip’s dong he slipped a thong.
Both dong and ding-dong lend themselves to word play (for instance, Long Dong Silver), and can be alluded to by mentions of dongles, Hostess Ding-Dongs, Ding Dong School, of course the Lear poem, etc.
From Wikipedia on LDS:
Long Dong Silver is a retired porn star known for his large penis.
Famed for the apparent size of his penis, reputedly 18 inches (46 cm), he appeared in several pornographic movies in the UK and US during the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, photographer Jay Myrdal has revealed that although Silver “was immensely endowed… a good nine or ten inches,” the penis featured in his porn shoots was faked.
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