[temporarily transplanted to r.f.h, followups back to AFU]

Olivers > writes:

>R H Draney extrapolated from data available...
>> Marc Reeve filted:
>>>pan ocho? I don't get it. (Is this an idiom that has somehow slipped
>>>through my mental collection of Spanish vulgarities?)
>>
>> Apparently...it might be more familiar if you make one word out of it,
>> and maybe do a gender-reassignment...I've heard there are several
>> variants...it's basically a reference to the female genitalia....r
>>
>I grew up with "pan noche", night bread, as a TexMex equivalent of the
>common English vernacular for female sex organs, but would not have made it
>as appropriate New Mexico Spanish.

Rub\'en Cobos's scholarly "A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern
Colorado Spanish" (ISBN 0-89013-142-2; published 1983, based on
Cobos's research starting in the early 1940s) has this entry:

_Panocha_, f. [<Mex. Sp. _panocha_, a kind of raw brown sugar]
a pudding, conserve or dessert made from ground wheat grain
which has been sprouted. Also, female organ (taboo).

I presume that AmEng "penuche" (brown-sugar fudge) also comes from
_panocha_. I further presume that no particularly close-sounding
variant of _panocha_ was current in Nicaragua during the late 1920s;
else my father would *not* have repeatedly told mixed groups the
story of how a tin of penuche, sent to him by his sister when he
was stationed there during the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, and
which had acquired a thick growth of mold during its long transit
through the tropics, was eagerly consumed by him and his fellow
Horse Marines, after simply scraping the mold off.

Lee Rudolph