to pass small twigs through the tongue or the ears, to draw blood as a sacrifice to the deities (see Molina)
a penitential ritual that involved drawing sticks (tlacohtli) through the tongue [causing bloodletting] Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 54.
the passing of twigs through the tongue and ears; perforation; self-sacrifice (a pre-Columbian ceremony) Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 72, 73, 198.
third oldest brother; 'teach' suggests older brother, and tlaco means middle, which led Anderson and Dibble to suggest third oldest Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 108.
a stick, a staff, a rod, a stalk, a switch (see Karttunen and Molina); osier twigs or maguey spines (see Sahagún attestations); relates to blood-letting self-sacrifice
an enslaved person (for examples of the plural, see tlatlacotin) James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 236.
"little half," indigenous equivalent of "cuartilla," or roughly 2.2 acres (Lockhart); also, a person's name James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 166.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 2 -- The Ceremonies, no. 14, Part III, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1951), 70.