"I feel readers are poised to judge and say – if I am not willing to be mono-grateful, why spawn at all?"

"I am grateful that my body will split in half in late summer, and I will probably live through it, being a resident of the affluent west, but the gratitude is ambivalent. And, as the child grows, I meet other pregnant women and learn that we are not all living in a Barbie Gets Up the Duff Dream Palace of Fecund Ecstasy; some of us are depressed, resentful, afraid. But we are, on the whole, silent, in the shadow of the tyranny of impending motherhood."

From the first paragraph of an essay by Tanya Gold called "I am silenced by the tyranny of impending motherhood," which has the last sentence: "This is the martyrdom of an entire sex and it is foolish and childlike, made by babes."

That's in The Guardian, which I'm reading this morning because it's been scooping on the spying, so I had to puzzle over the British form of expression. Duff Dream Palace? The OED says "duff" — the colloquial adjective — means "Worthless, spurious, false, bad, ‘dud’." Example: "I went down to the pub because the play was so duff." (1965   ‘J. Lymington’ Green Drift i. 8.) Less comprehensible example: "It was said by the erks that he once sold rock on Blackpool sands. This was just ‘duff gen’." (1944   G. Netherwood Desert Squadron 10.)

In the American edition of the new Dictionary of Received Ideas, under "duff," we're told: Be sure to mention that Homer Simpson drinks Duff Beer. And as long as we're composing new entries for The Dictionary of Received Ideas, under "Barbie," let's have: Assert that Barbie's measurements fail to correspond to any real woman's measurements. And under "Motherhood"... what do you think? Gold would say: All women are mono-grateful for their impending motherhood.

Hey, Gold! The mono-gratefulness presumption is the offspring of abortion rights. In the old days — I was there — there was absolutely nothing of the kind. In fact, a standard expression was "She got in trouble."

(Here's the old Dictionary of Received Ideas, one of my favorite books. It works for 19th century France. I'd like a new one, for Americans, as I've said many times.)