Re scrotum: when, thirteen years later, fat Van meets
fat Greg in Paris, he tells him: "Diet of champagne,
not beer. Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp."
(3.2)
The word is also used in Ada in plural: "Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent
creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the
eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our
splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious
monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora
and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls"
(1.3).
Alexey Sklyarenko