Language and Dreams

When the white man first established himself in the islands of New Zealand in the South Pacific more than a century ago he took with him the domesticated European cat. Before his advent the native Maoris had had no acquaintance with the cat. They therefore had to find a name for it. The name they chose was tori or tore. Now, this word was already in the Maori language. Tore was a term applied to the female genital, and was closely associated with other words which had strongly-sexualized tones, among them tora, an erection of the penis, kiritore, the labia minora, and kotore, the anus.

The question which immediately concerns us is how it came about that the Maoris should choose such a sexually-oriented word as tore to apply to the domestic cat. Of course, we have no cut and dried answer. But it will be immediately evident that the association which the Maoris apparently saw between the female genital and the cat is also an association that has cropped up in other lands. In English cant of the seventeenth century puss was a term applied to the female genital; later, puss became a term of affection for a girl. In England also the term cat has been commonly applied both to the female genital and to a harlot. In Australian slang, pussy is not infrequently used to denote the female genital, especially the female public hair.

Perhaps all these examples might be classed as having the nature of linguistic coincidences were it not for the psycho-analytic discovery that a similar cat–female genital motif occurs in dream symbolism.

Another illustration of the same process is found in the name which the Maoris gave to the gun—also introduced to New Zealand by Europeans. The name was putara, which is compounded of two other words: pu, meaning a wind instrument, and tara, meaning penis. Pu has many anal associations in Polynesian dialects. In Samoan it is applied directly to the anus. In Maori, the word pupa means to break wind; so does the Samoan taepu. The Hawaiian