Fritinancy

"Unpregnant"

Waiting to cross a street in my Oakland neighborhood, I noticed this sticker on a telephone pole:

“Need to be unpregnant?”

 

The blurry text on the left reads “Juniper Midwifery abortion pills by mail.” There are several services around the country that call themselves Juniper Midwifery (possibly because juniper needles are an abortifacient); this Juniper is based in New York and provides abortion pills in six states, including California, where surgical and pharmaceutical abortions are (still) legal.*

“Juniper” is a good name, but what really piqued my interest was unpregnant. I hadn’t seen the word previously—or thought I hadn’t—but in fact I just hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

Names of the year 2022: Fritinancy edition

Because my words-of-the-year list couldn’t cover the whole territory, here’s a list of upper-case names that stood out over the past year. For a different take, see Namerology’s name-of-the-year post about Volodymyr, which includes a discussion of language, identity, and spelling.

*

 

Word of the week: Roevember

After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, ending federal protections for abortion, American women showed their disapproval in many ways: by publicly protesting, by publishing opinion pieces, and by registering to vote in often unprecedented numbers. The collective impact of these actions may result in what is optimistically being called Roevember: a rejection in the November 8 state and federal election of elected officials who opposed women’s right to privacy and autonomy.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint the precise origin of “Roevember,” a portmanteau of Roe and November. The earliest usages I’ve found are from early August 2022 (let me know if you’ve found earlier examples!).

On August 1, Insider New Jersey reported on sightings of “See You in ROEvember” T-shirts at a Democratic gathering in Morris County.

“See You in Roevember” throw pillow, $29.99 at Fed Up Frannie’s

Word of the Week: Camping

A private Facebook group, USA Camping Resource Center, doesn’t offer tips on tents, bedrolls, or water purifiers. Instead, it’s a hub for information about abortion access in post-Roe America. Camping is one of several authority- and algorithm-evading code words on social media used as substitutes for “abortion”; others include “fishing,” “shoe-shopping,” and “bookstore.” As NBC News reported on June 30, “The posts follow similar coded language trends used by people trying to avoid algorithmic censorship on social media or potential detection by law enforcement.”

Two almost identically worded tweets from May 4, 2022—the earliest examples of the message I’ve found. Text: “If you are a person who suddenly finds yourself with a need to go camping in another state, a state friendly towards camping, just know that I will happily drive you, support you, and not talk about the camping trip to anyone ever.” Link and link.

Word of the week: Penumbra

A penumbra is a partially shaded area, in particular “that of the shadow cast by the moon on the earth in a solar eclipse, or by the earth on the moon in a lunar eclipse, resulting in an area that experiences only a partial eclipse” (OED). The word comes from Latin pen- (“almost”) and umbra (“shadow”); that pen- is the same “almost” we see in penultimate: the almost-last thing in a series.

But I’m not here to talk about astronomy or Latin or second-to-last things. I’m here to talk about abortion, the US Supreme Court, the US Constitution, and a thrilling theatrical performance I urge you to see.

 

Earth’s umbra (central shadow) and penumbra (extended shadow) during a lunar eclipse. Via NASA.gov.

Word of the week: Bimbo

Ms. magazine, which launched 50 years ago this summer, wasn’t destined to be called Ms. In a roundtable interview about the magazine’s founding, published this week in the New York Times Sunday Review, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalls that one name she and her co-founders considered was Sisters. Another was Sojourner, in honor of the 19th-century African American activist Sojourner Truth. And at one point, co-founder Gloria Steinem suggested Bimbo. “She meant it as an ironic appropriation,” Pogrebin told the Times, “but in those years, we didn’t have the luxury of irony.”

This wasn’t the only bimbo-drop in the June 19 Sunday Review: On the very same spread as the Ms. story is an essay about “BimboTok,” a “sex-positive and sex-work-positive” subset of TikTok where “comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics” while “talking about how hot and dumb” they are. “BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type,” writes the author, Sophie Haigney. “Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.”

Neither of these stories troubles to define bimbo; both seem to take it for granted that we know what it means: An unserious young woman with what used to be called loose morals. An airhead. A floozy.

But bimbo wasn’t always an insult. It didn’t even always refer to a woman. Originally a masculine Italian diminutive, the word migrated a century ago into American slang, where it changed its sex and its sense.

May linkfest

Fifty years ago this month, seven Chicago-area women were arrested and jailed on eleven counts of performing abortions and “conspiracy to commit abortion.“ They were members of a clandestine feminist network known as “Jane” that, for four years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the US, helped women terminate their pregnancies. Their story—more relevant than ever, now that Roe’s protections are in imminent peril—is told in a new documentary, The Janes, that will premiere on HBO on June 8. But The Janes isn’t the first telling of the story. In 1995, a former Jane member, Laura Kaplan, published a history of the group, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Feminist Abortion Service. I read it a couple of weeks ago and recommend it to you. (I found it in my local public library.) Here’s a passage that could have been written today: “Women are being reduced, once again, to the incubators of future generations with total responsibility but no power. That is the same oppressive view that the women’s movement sought to challenge. It is not just abortion, but women’s power to control their destinies that is at stake.”

Related: My post about “choice.” And here’s Clyde Haberman’s 2018 “Retro Report” for the New York Times about Jane’s work in Chicago. Link has been de-paywalled.

*

Word of the week: Choice

Last week, in response to the leaked draft of a US Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the legal right to abortion, the Pro-Choice Caucus of the US House of Representatives distributed new messaging guidelines to House Democrats.

NEW: The Pro Choice Caucus has just sent out messaging materials to House Dems on Roe draft.

One of the recommendations: Don't use "choice." pic.twitter.com/nqVA8W1nWT

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) May 12, 2022

Among the guidelines: Instead of choice (“harmful”), use decision (“helpful”).

Yes, this recommendation came from the Pro-Choice Caucus, not the Pro-Decision Caucus. But putting aside that mixed message, what’s the reason for the change?

What we talk about when we talk about abortion

Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.

In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico. 

Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”

Snitches get riches, in other words.

I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.

*

September linkfest

I’m about halfway through Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is because I keep stopping to take notes, usually punctuated with exclamation marks. Postrel is a journalist and independent scholar who has written very good books about style and glamour; here she elegantly blends centuries of research and her own investigations (she learned to spin thread, spent a week at a traditional Indian dyeing school, and visited weavers of Guatemalan huipiles) into a highly readable and compelling history. The glossary alone is worth the investment in the book. As Postrel writes:

We drag our heirloom metaphors—“on tenterhooks,” “towheaded,” “frazzled”—with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibers. We repeat threadbare clichés: “whole cloth,” “hanging by a thread,” “dyed in the wool.” We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing our fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

Listen to an interview with Postrel on The Woven Road, a podcast about fiber arts.