No I didn’t know that. Interesting. I assumed it was an acronym or abbreviation.

Yeah. It meant something different when I was younger as well. 🙂

Young people seem never to have heard of it and only know the term STD, which to me is an abbreviation for standard.

I think they call them PAP smears in the US. Their sensibilities are too delicate for the word “cervix”

Did you know that the Pap Smear was named by its inventor, George Papanicolaou, after spending over twenty years studying cervical smears (many of them provided by his long-suffering wife). I learned this from the marvellous book, The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which I’ve just finished. I can strongly recommend it, particularly if you have known someone with cancer (and who hasn’t).

Where I come from, VD would be considered a somewhat inappropriate abbreviation for Valentine’s Day 😉

“Restroom” is to my mind the ultimate misleading euphemism. The last place I’d go to for a rest is the bog!

We’ve been marketing Christmas earlier and earlier it seems.

When I was a kid we didn’t do Halloween and VD wasn’t a big thing. It seems the influence of the US is making those into a big thing now, though not as much as the US.

I remember getting a special card from a boyfriend when I was 19, and a rose from the next one at 20 and dinner at 21, but they weren’t big dramas. I can’t remember what I did, if anything. I’ve never expected anything for VD since, though I would have been disappointed if I had. I think the expectation is a wrong attitude, and that sort of thing shouldn’t depend on a date but on the relationship.

Having said that, I like my birthday to be remembered, though I don’t expect expensive gifts or a big production, or anything like that.

Ha ha 🙂

We use that one too sometimes. The word I mean. 🙂

Today, I listened to a restaurant mogul, Bobby Flay, say that in his restaurants, Valentine’s Day elicited the most tears. Basically, women who are let down because they were brought to a high-end restaurant for their first time while dating said person, and the question wasn’t asked. It’s a lame excuse for a celebrated day.

It’s a forced holiday…but aren’t they all?

A difference between NZ and the US is that in NZ toilets are often in a separate room from the bath, whereas in the States, they are almost always together. You may find a separate toilet on a floor that has no bath, but you will almost never find a bath without a toilet. So the same phrase is used whether looking for the toilet or the bath.