Names.

[rivka]

Okay, I have to post something so that bad news doesn't stay on the top of my journal for the week that we're at SUUSI. (Laptop was stolen, remember, so no updates from the road.) After packing every imaginable item in the world, however - do you have any idea how much gear three people, one of whom is a toddler, require for a week's active vacation bracketed by a long and tedious car trip? - I am out of energy for posting anything particularly brilliant, so I think I'll just point and rant:

What is with parents who deliberately decide to teach their daughters cutesy names for female genitalia? Especially, for god's sake, "girl parts" - which seems to be one of the most popular options? Should I go back and try to expunge the word "elbow" from Alex's vocabulary, in favor of "bendy parts?" After all, as these euphemizers point out defensively, it's not technically inaccurate.

Also: Something is seriously wrong when women who have actually had a baby come out of their vaginas don't understand the difference between a vagina and a vulva.

Also also: Something is extra-specially wrong with the linguist who claims that, because adult women futz around embarrassedly with euphemisms, it's not linguistically "correct" to teach children the anatomical names, because "it's not what native adult speakers spontaneously generate." What. The. Hell?

Comments

[lietya.livejournal.com]

I am not a linguist, but I am a descriptivist lexicographer - and I call bullshit. Any linguist who wanted to make that argument would have to present some pretty convincing evidence in terms of frequency of use and "generation," and I sincerely doubt that you could prove that those terms are sufficiently *uncommon* as to make them inaccurate. Most native adult speakers do not "spontaneously generate" the vast majority of their vocabulary, and yet presumably this person would not argue against teaching children "water" and "walk" and "eyeball" because native adult speakers don't re-invent the wheel on those words.

(I'm kind of depressed about the inability to differentiate vulva from vagina, too... but not as much as I was by the 19-year-old college female who had to have it explained to her in our lounge one night that you didn't HAVE to remove a tampon in order to urinate.)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I know women who prefer to remove the tampon to urinate so they don't have to deal with a pee-wet string. I just tuck it up a bit, if I really care, which I usually don't. That beats sandpaper-tampons.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's true, and that makes sense - I generally trim the string a bit to keep it neater, myself.

I really wasn't clear that this woman believed women only had two orifices just as men do (she thought the vagina served double duty for urine and sexual contact as the urethra does in the penis, and that there was no separate urethral opening). She was moderately horrified when confronted with an anatomy textbook illustration, although at least she was willing to use tampons for the first time after that.