Strange Car Conversation

[porphyry]

The other morning, we were all in the car together on our ways to school and work. The children were good-naturedly bickering in the back seat, but I, sensing the potential for the situation to escalate, intervened by using the sympathy appeal.

Me: Come on, you two. Settle down. You'll scare Flipper.
Andrew (without hesitation): I will scare Flipper until he hides in the bottom corner of your uterus!
Madeline: What's a uterus?
Malkhos: It's an upside-down Greek vase that Flipper is living in right now.

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

And the pun was operative in Greek that is why the Apollo of Delphi (the wombs) rode in a chariot drawn by Dolphins.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

How stupid of me! I never thought what Delphoi means. The very beginning of the "Eumenides" might have been a hint:

First, in this prayer, of all the gods I name
The prophet mother Earth; and Themis next,
Second who sat--for so with truth is said--
On this her mother's shrine oracular.
Then by her grace, who unconstrained allowed,
There sat thereon another child of Earth--
Titanian Phoebe. She, in after time,
Gave o'er the throne, as birthgift to a god,
Phoebus, who in his own bears Phoebe's name.
Etc.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

Womb AND Navel at the same time!?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

They no doubt knew they were connected from from the umbilical chord. Never read Aeschylus--interesting to see it there--but the same myth is in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and in various essays of Plutarch, complete with the battle with the Python. So there seem to be two variants of the story. Fontenrose would have done better to bring his attention to bear on that rather than treat Latin paraphrases of the Homeric Hymn as independent witnesses of the myth.