As a writer, I enjoy playing with language. This post explores some of the more colourful terms terms for what goes on when the pants come off. I’ll try to leave out the mundane and stick with silly rather than offensive. Female nether regions I feel like there’s generally a lack of creativity when it …
Bumpin’ Uglies & Other Slang for What Goes On “Down There” Read More »
As I get older and depression rots more of my brain, I’ve been having a hard time remembering whether sayings are real or if I’m making them up in my head. I feel particularly uncertain about idioms, and I turn to Google a lot because idioms aren’t logical; you either know them or you don’t. …
A fellow blogger recently mentioned that moist is the most hated word in the English language and I felt the need to go exploring to learn more about gross words. It turns out word aversion is the fancy way of referring to words that are just plain ickyānot what the words are describing, but the …
Is there a “right” way to talk about illness and disability? The current popular favourite is person-first language. It really got going in the 1990s, with the American Psychological Association leading the charge. Instead of talking about a “disabled person”, person-first language literally puts the person first, as in “person with a disability.” This has …
Is Person-First Language All It’s Cracked Up to Be? Read More »
Many fields have their own jargon, which Wikipedia describes as “specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity” that often isn’t well understood by people outside of that particular field. While jargon can help people within a field communicate precisely, that doesn’t necessarily translate well outside of the field. It can be …
Patrick Corrigan has been an academic crush for a number of years now. And what is an academic crush, you might ask? I like how his mind works. He’s a psychologist and stigma researcher, with lived experience to boot. He’s one of the most prolific publishers in academic journals that I’ve ever come across. His …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the euphemism treadmill. Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for …
As bloggers, we play with words. Some of them are more fun quirky than others. Here are a few of the interesting ways we use words. The pond that separates us Despite speaking the same language, there are a lot of differences between British-speak and American-speaking, with Canadian-speak thrown in there somewhere in between. Blogging …
I saw a post recently by another blogger about stigmatizing language that people should avoid. One of the things he mentioned was “committed suicide,” which is something that comes up regularly in discussions of language use related to suicide. I’m not convinced that it needs to be as big an issue as people make it …
“Committed Suicide”: Word Policing of Suicide-Related Language Read More »
Just to get things started, I’ll say that I’m “mentally ill”, I “suffer from” depression, and I’m a little bit “crazy”, although the degree varies over time. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, there are a lot of people who like to take a stand against terminology that is thought to stigmatize …
