Cicero's ("outstanding witnesses!") in his amusing account of two witnesses hiding naked in a public bathhouse. The diminutive was entirely confined to the anatomical sense; it is used 33 times by the medical writer Celsus, but not at all. The satirists Persius and Juvenal also used the word . Veterinary writers use both and . In Catullus (63.5), the testicles are famously referred to as ("weights"), perhaps a metaphor of the weights hung on threads of a loom. The exact words of the text here are disputed, but the general sense is clear: ("He tore off the weights of his groin with a sharp flint") Ovid ( 2.241) recounting the same story, and perhaps implying that Attis removed the whole organ, similarly uses the phrase ("the burden of his groin"). Other euphemisms are used in other writers. Ovid (Amōrēs 2.3) uses the phrase : ("He who first cut off the genital parts of boys ought himself to have suffered the wounds which he made.") In the Romance languages is productive in most of the Romance languages: cf. Italian , French ; Portuguese , Galician , Catalan , Sardinian , Romanian , Spanish (now a loanword in English). Cunnus: the vulva was the basic Latin word for the vulva. The Priapeia mention it in connection with , above. Etymology has a distinguished Indo-European lineage. It is cognate with Persian "anus" and "vulva", and with Greek (kusthos). Tucker and de Vaan derive it from an Indo-European *kut-nos akin to Welsh 'bag, scrotum'. Despite its similarity to "cunt", the Oxford English Dictionary cautions that the two words may have developed from different roots. Usage Cicero's §154 confirms its obscene status. Cicero writes: ("We say ("with them"), but we don't say ['with us'], but rather ; because if we said it like that, the letters would run together in a rather obscene way.") Because the /m/ of assimilates to the /n/ of , sounds very similar to , meaning "in/from/with a cunt twice". A similar euphemism occurs in French: the avoidance of , homophone to (cunt), by the insertion of a superfluous letter: . Horace, however, uses the word in his Satires () at 1.2.70, and again at 1.3.105: ("For even before Helen, the cunt was a most loathsome cause of war") Martial also uses it freely, for example (3.87): ("Rumour has it, Chione, that you have never been fucked and that there is