We have 5,000 euphemisms for menstruation, but we still can’t talk about them openly – and stop the stigma that’s harming women’s health and education I don’t remember much from my two brief years at boarding school – I was only eight. But do I remember one thing vividly: a school play that included a reference to “the visitors”. All the older girls and teachers laughed at this, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t funny. Afterwards, I was told that “visitors” were periods, though I don’t think I knew what periods were either. And that was my first exposure to society’s endless talent for euphemising an inevitable and natural aspect of women’s lives: the monthly shedding of the lining of their uterus. Uterus. Yuck. What a horrible word. Vagina: even worse. Menstruation sounds like a disease. Menarche, endometrium: what do they even mean? Euphemisms are everywhere. Having written a book on sanitation, I’ve become expert at them. Languages have always contained them: the Greeks called them the Furies, those rather angry goddesses, or the Gracious Ones in the hope they would be. And they gave us the word “euphemism” in the first place – “to use a favourable word in place of an inauspicious one”. Euphemising is the opposite of blaspheming. The same magic was supposed to work when the Cape of Storms was renamed the Cape of Good Hope, although it stayed just as stormy. Continue reading...
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