Menopause, Lies, and DVRs
Today I’m preoccupied by two lies related to women. The first is “morning sickness” and the second is “hot flash.”
I would like to meet the woman who during her pregnancy only feels like puking in the morning. It sounds so manageable and neat. I and many others had it full on, all day and all night. As a word person, it bugs me, and worse, I believed it. Boy was I pissed when it wasn’t relegated to the morning. “All day nausea” sounds less appealing, but at least it’s accurate. Pregnancy presents a whole host of things to get used to and I, for one, like to know the truth beforehand. So why can’t we change the word? The sea experts have taken away a beloved name from my youth, “jelly fish” and supplanted it with the more accurate, but goofy sounding “sea jellies.” I propose, in the name of accuracy, we rename “morning sickness.” Here are some ideas to get started:
“All day puke fest,” “nausea all the time,” or “good luck eating for four months.”
Maybe part of the reason people avoid using the word nausea, is that no one can spell it, nor can they make the grammatical distiction between nausea and nauseous (I had to look up the spelling). People use it interchangeably, but according to my grammar book, they are different. And when I find that book, I’ll prove it.
Fast forward 15 or so years and I run into another word lie that bugs me: hot “flashes.” Now if it were a flash, as in fast, it wouldn’t be so bad, but the other day I had a whole hot hour–flash my ass. And I don’t even have them that often. I can imagine I’ll get even more steamed when they come with more frequency, which by the way is not in the definition of “flash,” even though the definition runs three inches long. I mean at that rate, flash could mean practically anything, so should we really be using such a feckless word to decribe a medical condition? It’s clearly up to us, because even the scientists haven’t tried to give it a Latin name.
I never took Latin, so I looked up synonyms for “flash,” and what I found made me even madder. Not only did someone pick the most inaccurate word for hot flashes, they also picked the least descriptive. I mean, check these out: “gleam, glance, glint, sparkle, glitter, glisten, glimmer , shimmer.” I mean heck, if you’re going to lie to me, make it good! I personally am going to start calling them “Hot glisten” when I’m feeling sexy and “hot shimmer” when I’m feeling like the ’70s.
So what’s the DVR topic? Well, mostly I was going for hip and funny, but on the topic of using words accurately, a DVR is a well-named thing, and acronyms can be useful. Maybe that would work for morning sickness. Good LUck eating for 4 Months=GLUM. Hmmm. I’ll keep working on it as soon as my hot shimmer is over.