I’ve always found the word “speculum” really disgusting. Not the device, although that’s no picnic, but the word itself. Here’s why:
My mom orders a lot of scientific supplies as part of her job, so when I was growing up, we tended to store things in cardboard boxes marked “glass pipette large” or “desiccator jar.” Then there was “vaginal speculum 144 count.” To this day, I have no idea why Mom had a box that once held vaginal speculums (specula?). Her work did not involve vaginas. What I do know is that when the time came to move, smack in the awkward middle of my adolescence, she packed a bunch of Doctor Who videos in that speculum box and had the movers carry it right into our living room. My adult self probably wouldn’t have cared that much, but 15-year-old me was totally mortified that the movers thought we owned a full gross of vagina devices.
Gross here is pretty apt. While much of my distaste for the word speculum comes from this formative experience, and some of it comes from the pelvic exams that came later, I still find the word pretty upsetting on its own. To me it sounds like some sort of buildup you scrape off your teeth, or the ooze from an alien pod that turns you into a vine monster (this actually happens in one of the aforementioned Doctor Who episodes, although no specula are involved). As it turns out, many words for women’s hygiene and health products come with a certain gross-out factor, independent (we think) of their function. Below, a sampling of our unfavorites.