To “prick a hare” meant to track a hare and “prick and praise” meant “the praise of excellence or success,” per the Oxford English Dictionary. It also once described wine or beer whose flavor had gone sour as in, “All the wine that pricks,” from a 1731 essay by Peter Shaw. If you’re not using prick as a personal insult or slang for male genitalia, it might just be functioning as a synonym for pierce or poke. In the late 17th century, the shape of those objects gave rise to yet another meaning: “a downward-hanging sausage curl on a wig.” In his 1688 book The Academy of Armory, for example, Randle Holme described a campaign wig as having “a Dildo on each side.” 3. It's unclear whether such songs had anything to do with dildo in the sex toy sense, which started cropping up in print around the same time. Here with me thou shalt but stay Only till I can display What I will do With a dildo, Sing do with a dildo.” “Sweet, now go not yet, I pray Let no doubt thy mind dismay. Here’s an example from Robert Jones’s 1601 Second Book of Songs and Ayres: But when it first started appearing in print in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, people were using it in songs and poems as a lilting nonsense word not unlike la. Nobody really knows where the word dildo came from.
An illustration from Denis Diderot's 18th-century 'Encyclopédie.' Figure 8 is a good example of a dildo.
