The fuller story
Start with Japanese. The major dictionary Digital Daijisen defines oppai as a baby-talk word for breast milk or for the breast itself. Its origin is debated: one slang dictionary traces it to ippai, “a cupful,” and Jisho, the popular online dictionary, tags it as children’s language with a second sense of simply “breast milk.” The everyday word chichi (乳) does double duty too: milk, and breasts.
Chinese does the same with 奶, nǎi: breast, milk, and the verb to breastfeed. Double it to nǎinai (奶奶) and you get grandmother, at least on the father’s side.
Then there’s Latin. Mamma meant the breast, and in a child’s mouth it also meant mama. In 1758, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus needed a name for the class of animals that includes us, he could have named us for any number of shared traits. He chose the milk gland: Mammalia, from mamma. The historian Londa Schiebinger has argued that the choice wasn’t neutral. Linnaeus was campaigning at the time against the common practice of wet-nursing, and he named a whole branch of life after the breast that he thought every mother should use.
Why it matters
The book says boobs are multilingual, and the dictionaries back it up. In languages that grew up a world apart, the word for the breast and the word for its milk keep collapsing into one. Language remembers what the culture sometimes tries to forget: the breast’s first meaning is nourishment.
Every time you call yourself a mammal, you’re naming yourself after milk. That’s a good place for a book like NURturing deSirE to start.
