Language has become so imprecise that…
…a lot of people don’t even seem to know what the word “vagina” means.
Now that I’ve got your attention—
But really, if they knew, would they be able to write stuff like this?:
You’re a busy gal, so when you get out of the shower every morning the things occupying your mind most likely include the amount of coffee you need in your body THAT SECOND, and that you’re already running late. You’re probably not thinking about the well-being of your vagina, since you assume everything is doing okay down south. However, it might be time to start thinking about it more often, because if you don’t completely dry off your vagina before getting dressed, there could be consequences.
Dry off your vagina? How, pray tell? And why? The vagina—in case you don’t know—is the inside part of the whole kit and kaboodle, the passage between the uterus and the outside part otherwise known as the vulva.
I’m pretty sure it’s the vulva the article’s talking about. I shudder to think what would be involved in “completely drying off” a person’s vagina, and let’s leave it at that.
[NOTE: You might be surprised how often people mix up the two words. Apparently they do it constantly (although it’s not something I’m monitoring too closely). I’m not the first person to have remarked on the fact of the frequent mix-up, either. The consensus is: give up on correcting people about it; that ship has sailed.]
Like, sorta, you know.
But they know how to put condoms on a banana.
Too funny.
I have to tell a story that happened to me many years ago. I was at work in a staff meeting, and one of my female co-workers was commenting about one of our contacts in a different organization. Kathy (my co-worker and friend) said, “That twat…”, and was stopped by the shocked expressions (and a few snickers) from the rest of the staff. She immediately knew she had made a faux pas, although she didn’t know what. So she began stammering, “I made that word up…I made that word up. It’s a mix of twit and (I can’t recall what else)…I made it up.” Her expression was priceless. I said, “That word is already taken. You need a new one.” I gave her a dictionary and let her look up the word, which didn’t really make her feel any better. It was probably the first staff meeting that was worth the time.
Anyhow, language is, indeed, becoming more imprecise. Some of it, I’m sure, is deliberate. Heck, I’m at the place where when I have to fill out forms, and they ask me for my “Gender”, I cross it out and write “Sex”, then answer “Male”. My own little form of rebellion.
Waidmann
Vagina is the PC leftist term for it. I used to belong to an internet support group for moms whose kids were born in the same month. There was a discussion about what the little boys called their penises. The lefties all said you have to use the correct anatomical terminology. I asked why then, they call their daughters’ vulvas vaginas, and they all ignored me.
It is odd that while common English vulgarities refer to the “whole kit and kaboodle”, the proper Latin-derived words do not. Hence, the common usage of the word “vagina” for the female genitalia as a whole. Language does evolve and words do change meaning over time.
Ripple:
How about “genitals” or “genitalia”?
Works for me.
For men, there are different terms for penis and scrotum, but no one ever seems to confuse the two and the term “genitals” covers the whole male kit and kaboodle. I see no problem with that good old Latin-derived word for the whole shebang for women, as well.
This surprises anybody ? There is actually an app out . Here that will remind you to change your tampon !
Not only is language always changing, most words in a language are changing as well. Once a language has a written form the changes slow considerably, but they continue nonetheless. (Consider, for example how different our phrasing was when we coined “nonetheless.”)
The ancient root *tik has changed very slowly over 10,000 years, but in its descendent languages it can mean finger (as in “digit”), one, hand, arm, ten-fingers (as in “dec”), single, to point.
They would be outraged at our imprecision, using a precise word like “tik” to mean so many things now. Silly meant “blessed” 800 years ago. It changed in stages. Words do that. They always do that. Consider how the shades of meaning in keep have been moving from from “hold” to “sustain” in our times. Keep on keeping on, keep it up, keep trying.
Precision is a good thing, and words meaning the same thing to everyone is helpful in that. Hewing to the older meaning of a word is a natural tendency in that striving, and the effort is not entirely wasted. But when a word has stretched too far or collapsed too far for clarity, human beings automatically start finding other ways to gain precision. They add modifiers or force other words into service. There is no deterioration of thinking which we are noting by observing language changes. We have always had imprecise people with us.
If precision in terminology evolved, then by what process does imprecision ‘evolve’?
Language follows culture and anyone who imagines that the West’s culture has not greatly devolved is either a liar or in willful denial.
I’ve noted this confusion over female body parts on several occasions, as much by women as men. It surprises me, as the two body parts are clearly not one. Sort of like rectum and colon. The most surprised I ever was happened when I heard a woman professor of biology at the college level confuse the vagina and the urethra. That was a real surprise, but I didn’t bother to correct her. She had the home field advantage, after all.
mollynh,
I think the app must be for transwomen who have had ‘corrective’ surgery and want to maximize the feminine experience. As they age they will need an app to tell them they just had a hot flash. 😉
Neo…
Such a naming LAUNCHED human language… according to Murray Gell-Mann.
“Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmÊŒri ˈɡɛl ˈmé¦n/; born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.[4] Gell-Mann has spent several periods at CERN, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 1972.[5][6]
He introduced, independently of George Zweig, the quark–constituents of all hadrons–having first identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of hadrons. This symmetry is now understood to underlie the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, a quantum number which he also discovered.
He developed the V−A theory of the weak interaction in collaboration with Richard Feynman. In the 1960s, he introduced current algebra as a method of systematically exploiting symmetries to extract predictions from quark models, in the absence of reliable dynamical theory. This method led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment and provided starting points underpinning the development of the standard theory of elementary particles.”
wiki…
His hobby has been the research — backwards through time — towards the ORIGINAL words at the root of all languages.
Lacking any living witnesses, he still has conclusions:
The oldest word, period, is “No.”
All languages ever since have mutated around negation.*
One might well surmise that the first word “no” was uttered by a mother to her curious child. Such negation training is still easily seen in chimp maternal care. ( ditto for bonobos )
Gell-Mann’s bet for the second oldest word is “$unt” — estimated to be at least 50,000 years old — and likely far, far older.
It’s the root for “flower” — but of course.
And the first declarative had to issued from female to male — spelling out no action tonight. “No $unt ! ” — And the push off.
It pops up in everything from cunnilingus to cuneus (latin: wedge) and ‘cuneiform’ script.
The ‘heart’ symbol is merely a stylized vulva, of course.
Humanity has had a one track mind for eternity.
Women have been ‘in charge’ of language ever since — still emitting twice as many words as the guys.
Witness the verbosity of gals texting versus any PUA male target.
%%%%
* One might note the universal yes is head bobbing up and down, the universal no is head twisting left and right.
This is plainly the genetic legacy of infantile nursing ‘commands.’
When seeking the nipple, the infant bobs its head up and down.
When its belly is stuffed silly, the infant pushes off by turning its head a quarter turn so that reconnection is impossible.
I’d say it’s a primate ‘thing.’
%%%%%
One thing we can say for sure: once language began, sexual relations were never quite the same.
Sex launched video tape — at retail — and I’d dare say made the Internet what it is today.
( As the Internet rolled out, every society started out with the forbidden visual fruits.
The most repressed societies have astounding pr0n ‘habits.’
{ Saudi Arabia, Pakistan }
“Dry off your vagina? How, pray tell? ”
Sigh. That’s what those strange nozzles that come with electric hair dryers are for. And why the cord is coiled.
Waidmann: Kathy’s usage of twat was completely correct and appropriate in British usage.
This is Neo’s most desperate attempt yet to not talk about Trump. Maybe I can tie it all together.
Trump has small hands and, while evading the draft and sleeping around, said that avoiding STD’s was his personal Vietnam. Neo’s ambivalence about Vietnam became part of her personal political change.
South of the border, talk of politics inevitably involves anatomical references south of the border. Trump wants to build a wall.
Without a moral map and compass, I’m getting lost, and I haven’t a clue how Trump can talk on and on, but no words come out.
Lie down on the couch and try not thinking of Trump. It’s a psychological exercise in free-floating nonsense.
Cornflour:
And here I thought I had disguised it so well.
Thank you Neo. That was quite instructional.
Perhaps an appropriate question would be, “why do words evolve?”. Actually, we are reminded every day that they often evolve, and their meaning become ambiguous, to satisfy an agenda. A very effective means of sowing little seeds of confusion. The next step, of course, is to proscribe certain benign words, so that anyone who uses them can then be marginalized. A level of social–and political– anxiety can be achieved.
Of course common laziness is another reason. If one cannot bother to maintain an adequate vocabulary, it may be convenient to use out of context the words that one actually commands. Oldflyer’s fourth law states that if well known entertainers, and the like, indulge in this, the usage will quickly become widely accepted.
Don’t you mean, “That cabin has sailed?”
Really, though, I have always assumed language changes came about primarily via comedy skits, much like this one.
London Trader – True enough. The joke was that Kathy didn’t know either usage of that word. She thought she had made it up. She would have been fine had she stuck to twit, and nobody would have blinked. In fact, we all would have agreed. But Kathy is a good girl, and you pretty much have to know her to know how totally out of character was the word she actually said. That’s what made it funny to us and embarrassing to her.
Waidmann
Poor Kathy.
I will never forget in 9th grade when it was my turn read aloud, and I was apparently the only one in the room who did not know the correct pronunciation of the word “teat”. Some little Ass had to correct me verbally, of course.
You can take the boy from the wrong side of the track, but it takes a long time to take the wrong side out of the boy. (I spent the war years on the other side because Dad was gone, and Mother had to make do.)
If memory serves, ‘vagina” is Latin for “sheath”, as for a sword.
Ignorance of human anatomy is just another reason to void franchise to vote for at least to vote for 2 decades.
Yes I’ve noticed this confusion.
Vagina is a Latin word and it means sheath. Strange that the part of the “kit and kaboodle” that is there to receive the penis, has become the politically correct word.
I sometimes wonder if it might not be a bad idea for universities to appoint a body of faculty to encourage young women and perhaps some young men to address how society views women. We could call it the department of Women’s Studies.
Let Leave the language term aside, as the Article made by a a professional medical specialist, I think that very bad, as he/she who should knew the difference between two words, however he also new the original name for all human body parts.
So now we have people lazy in using the language and right terms even though there are professionals which make me wonder about the level of their professional service.
Geoffrey Britain – we usually agree, but in this you are not correct. I’m not sure what you mean with the analogy of evolution and de-evolution for precision of language and culture, as language changes and cultural changes don’t have mechanisms at all similar to biological evolution, and “de-evolution” is an artificial construction left over from the idea that evolution is somehow always improvement.
Just to be precise.
Next time don’t call me a liar or in willful denial, okay? I might misunderstand and think you were being insulting.
Western culture is certainly changing, in many ways I don’t like. It is not becoming less precise or thinking more clouded, or anything like that, however. We like to believe that in the good old days people knew what logic was and thinking was more rigorous, but that is entirely due to selection bias. The best thinkers remain in play, but they were not representative of their age. People were not smarter in 1916 or 1816. They were less literate, less numerate, less informed – if you read the primary source material of even the educated – diaries, letters, public records – it will jump out at you. Schools were worse.
Blert – Gell-Mann is only a side player in the Santa Fe Institute’s linguistics branch. He was concerned with developing an institute that crossed academic boundaries. He is speculating on the basis of the research of the highly-controversial linguists there (pals of his, certainly), such as Merritt Ruhlen and the late Sergei Starotsin. Those are the lads you want to read up on. Morris Swadesh, too. Ruhlen’s list of oldest words still discernible from the proposed Proto-Human language does not have vulva/vagina in first place, but tenth (penis is 14th, I recall). To be fair about that, the ranking is more a measure of confidence than of age. As for some negation being the first word, that is plausible, but extremely speculative. Mama and Dada remain more likely. But pick up Ruhlen’s 1994 book on the subject from the library: The Origin of Language. Quite excellent.
“You’re probably not thinking about the well-being of your vagina,”
But I’ll bet that creep in 4B is.
Assistant Village Idiot Says:
June 1st, 2016 at 9:23 am
Thanks for the tip.
AVI
STOP is such an important function — danger // alert — that it has to be everyone’s favorite as primal.
It’s SO important that we incorporate it into machine logic, digital logic and signals logic.
{ ie kill switches — every moving assembly line has to have them.
{ Every military op has a ‘beat retreat’ // return to base // run like hell signal.
{ All which are subsets of “No” and “Oh, no….! ”
{ The primacy of the emergency “No” is so great that it is still invoked within Hollywood plots.
{eg: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
That “no” has so many ‘subtended’ meanings — extensions — modifiers — is yet another ‘tell’ that it’s hyper-ancient.
It’s even made its way to Boolean logic — the logical Not ~ “no.”
In all these instances, “no” functions as a fundamental ‘quark’ of speech.
That “no” had a decisive impact on human events — from the crib to the hunting party — scarcely needs emphasis.
It’s a life-or-death utterance.
ALL other words carry LESS import.
One might also note: gals STILL love to say “no.”
And suitors are STILL, like Sisyphus, rolling their pitch up hill to her decision point.
This saga is even replayed in pr0n scripts — with a fair amount of wit — as the decision point was long passed when the cameras started rolling.
Assent, female co-operation, has always been front and center.
Meaning that “no” has a direct impact on the propagation of our DNA.
“Mama” and “Dada” can’t come close; BTW, the former is far more ancient than the latter.