Charles Simmons, in his
novel,
Powdered Eggs, defines a
tribble as "...a young man with
three empty testicles,
all mothers like tribbles, they know that their
daughters are safe with them."
Simmons' epistolary novel about a young writer's romantic tribulations was published in 1964 (predating David Gerrold's use of the term "tribble" as a name for throbbing, fuzzy little balls in his teleplay for The Trouble with Tribbles) and won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. The first paperback edition of Powdered Eggs was published in 1967, the year in which the "tribble episode" of Star Trek was written.