End games

So it's official: According to last Sunday's New York Times, the word vajayjay - loosed into the mainstream last year by "Grey's Anatomy" and embraced by Oprah - is the friendly new term for the female genitals.

Vajayjay had an easy launch, as these things go. As a recent coinage, it had no natural enemies, no fuddy-duddies who grew up thinking it was taboo. And its baby-talk style advertises its innocent intentions: No leers here, folks.

But life on the edge of taboo territory isn't always so simple. Take butt, for instance: It's so common these days that till recently, I assumed it was welcome anywhere - or at least, anywhere a derriere might be mentioned. I learned otherwise when Emily Yoffe, dispensing advice in Slate magazine's Dear Prudence column last summer, doled out an unsolicited opinion on butt.

"I hate that this has become the acceptable way for children to refer to their backsides," she wrote. "It sounds so crude coming out of those little mouths. Can't we tell them it's called a behind, a rear end, a keister, a tushie, anything but a butt?"

"Crude" is a matter of taste, though, and Yoffe's surprised me. I had just been hiking with a family whose well-mannered 6-year-old, needing help to climb a boulder, begged "Dad, hold my butt!" And she's not the only youngster I know who thinks of butt as the default option.

True, I've also heard members of the diaper brigade tease each other with the epithet "poopy-butt," but I don't think "butt" is the part of the insult they find so thrillingly transgressive.

Still, my friends with younger kids assure me there are parents who agree with Yoffe, treating butt as just a bit vulgar - not offensive among adults, maybe, but not really a word for the tykes. Bottom, the polite word of my youth, is still the one teachers and pediatricians use, they say. And at least one newspaper flags the word in PG movie reviews: "Two uses of the word butt."

But those of us who find butt unremarkable have history behind us. The word has never been especially taboo; dictionaries call it slang or "informal." The anatomical butt is the same word we use for a rifle butt or a carpenter's butt joints - it means simply "end" or "thick part." (Butt isn't short for buttock, either; buttock is a diminutive, as hillock is of hill.)

William Safire, in his New York Times language column, also gave butt a thumbs-up after a reader called it "gutter language." In 1998, Safire said, butt was "as acceptable in polite modern discourse as foot or penis. The slang expression to kick butt is also inoffensive to most people."

Butt is also, said Safire, "a euphemism for ass, a word not permitted in The New York Times unless referring to a donkey." Or uttered by a president: The banned word was allowed in quotes from the Nixon tapes and the first President Bush, noted Safire, and recently the younger Bush was also quoted on kicking you-know-what.

Even within the Times, though, opinions vary. A year after Safire's endorsement of butt, the Times editor subbing for the vacationing columnist called "kick butt" a vulgarity spread "from locker room to living room" by the mass media. (Including, presumably, the Times, which printed "kick butt" as early as 1970.)

Butt's ongoing PR problem is no doubt a side effect of success. Like many euphemisms, the more it stands in for a "worse" word, the more it acquires that word's taint: Eventually, listeners hear butt and think a-word. And Beavis's pal Butt-head couldn't have done butt's reputation much good.

Even if you don't like butt, though, do you really want your kid sporting a keister? The word is 19th-century slang for suitcase, 20th-century slang for buttocks, and it was old-fashioned back when Ronald Reagan used it.

Tush, from the Yiddish tochis, is fine if you live where Yiddishisms circulate freely. (Though tochis too was vulgar once, says Leo Rosten in "The Joys of Yiddish.") But there are vast swaths of the nation where nobody knows a tochis from a tchotchke. Growing up in the flyover, I learned the English word tush, "nonsense" - immortalized in the "Mikado" character Pish Tush - long before I was introduced to tushies.

And though bottom is OK for little ones, it's weird to read in the paper that an Olympic gymnast "fell on her bottom and skidded off the mat." Not the word a sportswriter would use for a quarterback's buns, I'll bet.

There are plenty of other choices on the table, of course: duff, glutes, buns, booty, rump, caboose, backside, badonkadonk, bum, tail. We'll ignore fanny (in Britain, it means vajayjay), but how about prat? (Yes, that's what a pratfall is.) They all have their charms. But the bottom line? I'm still betting on butt.