Alexey Sklyarenko: The first three letters in scrotum are the same as in Screepatch and
scratch. Cf. "a fiery irritation...which the weak, the
adorable, the vuluptuous took advantage of to scratch and scratch and scratch
scrumptiously (canteen cant). 'Sladko! (Sweet!)' Pushkin used to exclaim in
relation to a different species in Yukon." (Ada: 1.17) The fiddler
(skrypach) in Pushkin's poem (see the full Russian text below) says in
reply to the castrate's question what does he do when he is bored: "I scratch my
testicles."
JM: I suppose that
your research is mainly dedicated to "Ada. For the present collection
of references, there is a variation which has not been spelled out by
Nabokov ( I learned the Spanish word "cojones"
from Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and, perhaps, this is one of the
reasons why Nabokov refers to him with the wordplay on "balls, bells,
bulls").
" Ada remembered, of course, mariposa, butterfly,
and the names of two or three birds (listed in ornithological guides) such as
paloma, pigeon, or grevol, hazel hen. Marina knew aroma and hombre, and an
anatomical term with a ‘j’ hanging in the middle. In consequence, the
table-talk consisted of long lumpy Spanish phrases..."
Ada I,
ch.6
The descriptive power that may lie in the color and shape of a word,
or in a succession of them, is often explored by modern advertisings.
Nabokov's play with the double "Os" intermediated by another letter, as in
"Ada," was used earlier in his short-story "A Guide do Berlin."
I go out in the flat gray light of early morning, an
even stripe of fresh snow stretches along the upper side of each black pipe
while up the interior slope at the very mouth of the pipe which is nearest to
the turn of the tracks, the reflection of a still illumined tram sweeps up like
bright-orange heat lightning. Today someone wrote "Otto" with his finger on
the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two
soft o's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow
upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit
tunnel.