Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren't going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.
So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it's an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis... And it's the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.
I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.
He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).
But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.
BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can't not see once you realize it's there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein's monster we call English
So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.
Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because "copulation" is Latin and "fucking" is germanic. Same goes for "feces" and "shit", "vagina" and "cunt", and so on.
Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, "cow" vs "beef", "sheep" vs "mutton", "deer" vs "venison".
It's the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it's just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.
Why? Well, think about it. You've got a class system. You've got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it's cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it "beef", since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a "Cow" because he speaks something like German.
English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it's really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.
BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call "top" vs "bottom". We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.
The Romans didn't think "gay" was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use "cinaedus" as an insult, and the closest term we have is "cocksucker". Except they didn't really imply the homosexual nature of that insult... For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. "cocksucker" or "pussylicker", it's all the same. Similarly they had "irrumo, irrumare", which means "to make someone suck your cock", which is an expression of dominance. Again, it's not about the possible homosexuality: it's the topping.
And similarly, they had "pathicus", an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it's not about homosexuality, as that's fine: it's about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.
The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.
