First of all, a little bone to pick with language. What’s up with the pause in menopause? It’s not like it’s coming back on. It’s a bit like when someone asks to borrow a piece of gum or a tissue – mate, we don’t want it back! We really should be calling it menostop, or menogone or menogoodriddance. While we’re at it, shouldn’t it at the very least be called womenopause?
As it turns out, digging into the language is illuminating. The word menopause as we know it was first recorded in French in 1845. This word goes back to the Latin menopausis, which itself is rooted in the Greek mēn (meaning month) and pausis (a cessation or pause). This explains the Oxford English Dictionary definition as “the permanent cessation of menstruation; the period of a woman’s life when this occurs”.
What this suggests is that menopause exists on a kind of continuum – there are
