"Noting that forty-five per cent of British women cannot find the vagina on an unmarked diagram, while fifty-nine per cent of American women cannot find the uterus..."

"... a shocking fact that Nuttall blames in part on the hard-to-remember Latinate words—she laments the loss of terms such as 'wings,' 'gates,' and 'ports' that once described female anatomy. She dislikes 'period' as a word for menstruation: much better is 'the fluidity' of the long-lost 'overflownis.' In place of the Latinate 'deliver,' which to Nuttall sounds 'as if the baby’s just handed to us out of the tinfoiled crib of a takeaway food courier,' she suggests the sturdy Middle English of 'barnish' or 'bearn.' As a word campaigner, Nuttall is blithely decisive when it doesn’t matter, and cagey when it does. She is happy to advocate for words that have no chance of taking off, or to judge a word for a history that is no longer expressed in its meaning. But on subjects that she has identified as politically contentious—exactly where etymological expertise, wisely or not, is most sought—she is anxiously neutral. 'Queer,' she writes, has been reclaimed 'by some'; 'for others,' it 'remains an irredeemable slur.' Phrases like 'pregnant people' and 'people with a uterus' are 'for some,' helpful, precise, and inclusive; 'for others,' this language 'obscures social reality' or is 'dehumanising.'... 'Taking into account patriarchy’s habit of urging women to be quiet and of caricaturing those women who do speak up or out as gossipy, frivolous, hysterical, dull or bitchy, it seems regressive to stifle women’s words, however progressive the motivation. Each woman must have the terms of her own choosing.'"

From "How Much Do Words Matter? A scholar of medieval literature believes that words used in the past can empower women in the present" (The New Yorker), discussing the book "Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words," by Jenni Nuttall. My excerpt leans toward quoting Nuttall. The article itself is by S.C. Cornell, and this is this author's first New Yorker article.