(About male crotch care, carefully phrased, but still deeply into male crotches, so not to everyone’s taste.
From a morning some time ago, after a pleasant long sleep that ended with a hot sex dream that turned into a sweet romantic dream, from which I awoke feeling especially refreshed. Got to the morning wash-up portion of the program (scrub hands, refresh face, wash crotch); if you take quick whizzes every hour during the night, bedside, then your hands and all of your crotch, from pubes to perineum, need a serious washing (and your damp briefs go into the laundry basket, to be replaced by fresh dry skivvies). Normally the crotch wash is a brisk businesslike affair, pleasing but in no way sensuous — but on this morning my body was singing along with my spirit, and I experienced the cleansing as a delicate, luxurious massage of my guy parts. It was delightful.
I began humming the tune to “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja / Stets lustig heissa hopsasa!” (I find Papageno inspiring) while I went through the routine: pubes and the belly just above them; penis shaft and base; testicles; the clefts on either side of the genitals, alongside the thighs; and the perineum. Along the way, I idly wondered what those clefts — roughly analogous to armpits — were called. When I got to my computer I quickly discovered that the compound thigh pit (analogous to standard armpit and informal elbow pit ‘the inside of the elbow’ and knee pit ‘the back of the knee’; this is the world of paired bodily concavities, or clefts) was moderately common (a few cites below); that crotch pit seemed to be used only for the perineum; and that the noun groin ‘thigh pit’ was also common (a few cites of both groins below).
Then, since there’s a use of the noun groin for the whole area (in kick him in the groin and the like) I went to see what NOAD said about the paired concavities. And was mightily surprised to find that it seemed to maintain that the groin was a spatially discontinuous region of the body, not unlike the nation of Pakistan at the time of the partition of British India into separate nations of India and Pakistan, with Pakistan coming in two widely separated pieces: West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). For the groin, one region, two sides; not two paired bodyparts. This view of the semantics of groin is shared by the Wikipedia entry. But not, it seems, by most speakers.
A careful look at the OED (in an entry still in revision) suggests that it’s the source of the confusion, since it attempts to treat the bodypart noun (in things like along with my armpits, both my groins are sweaty and in need of deodorant) and the body region, or place / location, noun (in things like the glands in my groin, on both sides, are swollen) with just one definition (despite their different semantics and distinct syntax), and mixes examples of both types.
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