Name: Female etymology
Rating: 88 (20 reviews)

One wonders what terminology would be preferred by medical women: The first time I got pregnant, I was a comparatively young mother, for my...

One wonders what terminology would be preferred by medical women:

The first time I got pregnant, I was a comparatively young mother, for my demographic: I was 25, in medical school, surrounded by classmates who, for the most part, were not reproducing yet. By the third pregnancy, 11 years later, I was over 35, which classified me, in the obstetric terminology I had learned in medical school, as an “elderly multigravida,” that is, someone who was having a child but not her first child, after 35. (If it was your first child, you were an “elderly primigravida,” or “elderly primip” for short — even as a medical student, I had a strong sense that no woman had invented this terminology.)

First, it's not as if using the literal Latin term for a condition is exactly new. Second, there would be limited utility in the terminology that would be preferred by women to describe everything from pregnancy to cancer and tooth decay.