Up yer bum!

Oh dear.  I've been at it again.  A couple of months ago, I got dragged into a long comment-thread exchange here, on Stuart's Found In China blog; and this week I've found myself doing it again, here.  My recurring antagonist is a young man who calls himself 'Pffefer'.  He's a lot sharper and more coherent than your typical fenqing, at least when he keeps off the trucker's pills; however, from time to time, he can get quite offensive, and I had to issue him a bit of a warning this week.  Knowing something of my Classical education, he quipped back that perhaps I would start insulting him in Greek.   Well, yes indeed.   A favourite term that came to mind at once was the verb rhaphanidoô (I'm pretty sure there's also a form rhaphanizo, although I can't seem to find that online).  Unfortunately, none of the dictionaries I've looked at seem to support Greek characters.   It's derived from rhaphanis, a type of radish, and the venerable Liddell & Scott Greek Lexicon famously defined it as to thrust a radish up the fundament.  Which was no use at all to a 13-year-old schoolboy: what the heck was the fundament??  The distinguished scholars were, of course, coyly avoiding the use of the word anus.    Yes, this word means to ravish with a radish!    But not in a good way.  Oh no.  Apparently, this was a particularly nasty punishment often visited upon adulterers and other chaps who had offended the master of the house in some way.   The exact mechanics of this, though, were never - as far as I was ever able to discover - elaborated on anywhere in the surviving Classical canon (it's the sort of the word you're only likely to find in the bawdy comedies of Aristophanes, and he's not a great one for explaining his references - "lion on the cheese-grater", anyone?); and so this was a question which excited much speculation during my years of studying Ancient Greek.   The first suggestion one usually encounters is that this type of radish was rather large, and thus its insertion was inevitably painful. This is at first quite a surprising idea to us Brits, who only know the small, round purplish red variety - which are of the size and shape of things that people do quite often put up their bottoms for pleasure. It's quite an eye-opener for the naive teenager to discover that other members of the radish family can grow much larger.  I don't know if anyone's done any investigation into what kinds of vegetable they were growing in Attica at that time.   Then, of course, one adds in the fact that the radish is usually quite a piquant vegetable, that perhaps it is its heat that is the main source of anal discomfort.  But the larger radishes are mostly very mild, aren't they?  And you wouldn't expect any of the spiciness to seep out unless it had been peeled - did they peel before thrusting?   The ultimate, and most convincing (most alarming!), conjecture is that one made cross-cuts in the end of the vegetable, so that when introduced to a moist environment it would soon fan out into a floret - making it difficult or impossible to remove again.  Ouch!     So, Mr Pffefer, please stay on your best behaviour, or I may have to come after you with a peeled radish.