ABSTRACT
An agricultural axiom, it also refers to the breaking of societally accepted sexual taboos. Pregnancy outside marriage, or extramarital sex, was forbidden for it was believed that such actions went contrary to the precarious balance of nature that was maintained by the observance of strict rules of conduct, of morality. Transgression of the taboos could even affect the harvest, wherefore the offender was required to pay a penalty. One ca-dao preserves this situation for us;
are explicit references to the glans penis and the nipples of a woman’s breasts; the saying is distilled from a folk-tale (Ngọc 1934: Vol. 1, 168). More humourously a boy sings of eggplant in a ca-dao:
