"They [Burgess’s students in foreign languages] just could not understand why one word had to be masculine and another feminine and, in German, yet another neuter. One student puzzled over das Pferd and asked ... if all the horses were castrated in Germany. My approach was as gross as the one I used with my illiterates when teaching the alphabet. I said that some cultures were so obsessed with sex that sex entered into things that had no sex. Thus, a pencil was like a prick and hence was properly el lapiz or le crayon. Water was rightly feminine: you could dip your wick in it. Discussing this technique – prick-words and cunt-words – in the Army Education Office, I disgusted a high Anglican clerk who spoke like a bishop. He asked for a transfer and told the major why. This, naturally, did me no good."