First, a brief public service announcement: This edition of “The Bloody Red Pen” concerns itself with clinical terminology as applied to the female nether regions. If you’re the sort who gets indignant or starts feeling all squicky inside when you hear or read about such things, you might want to go check out some pictures of cats with funny captions for a while. Go ahead, I won’t hold it against you. We’ll just plan on catching up later.

Are those guys gone? Okay then…

If you’ve been paying attention over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that the word “vagina” has made its way into more-or-less everyday usage, assuming much of the role that used to be exclusively occupied by euphemisms that were, shall we say, less medical-sounding. I suspect this evolution of the language is probably due to the enormous success — or at least the notoriety — of Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, but regardless of why it’s become popular, the word is definitely out there in the zeitgeist in a way it never was when I was younger. Oh, sure, the word existed back in the day; everybody knew it. But nobody could say it without smirking. Now we can, and we’re saying it a lot, in all kinds of settings from light-rail trains to nationally televised sit-coms, along with derivative terms such as the diminutive “vag” and the nauseatingly cutesy (but thankfully short-lived, it seems) “va-jay-jay.”

It’s too bad most everybody is using it incorrectly.

Consider the following headline, for example:

Vagina Exposed On ‘So You Think You Can Dance’? (NSFW VIDEO)

Apparently, some contestant on some amateur-hour TV show I don’t watch responded to praise by falling on the floor and flashing the entire country (well, whatever percentage of it was watching this particular show) with what lies beneath her skirt. Somewhere, in some place I don’t really want to be, I guess there is a debate raging over whether she was wearing underwear or not, i.e., just exactly what it was America saw. Now, personally, I think the brou-ha over this is another of those ginned-up controversies that have some people (no one I know, but hey, it made the HuffPo, so it’s bugging somebody) rending their garments and gnashing their teeth over something that just isn’t that important, much like that Janet Jackson “Nipplegate” silliness that is somehow still dragging on five years later. Talk about much ado over nothing, people! But I digress. My point here is that whatever it was this bimbo displayed for the cameras, I highly doubt it was her vagina.

That’s because the vagina is the birth canal. It’s inside the body. For us to have seen this dancer’s vagina, she would’ve had to do something a lot more extreme and awkward than simply spreading her legs. What America saw — if it saw anything at all — was her vulva. A related structure, to be sure, but definitely not her vagina. Vulva, vagina. Two different words for two different things.

I first noticed this misuse a couple years ago after Britney Spears was unladylike for the cameras while getting out of a car. You remember the incident, I’m sure. It was the toast of the town for several weeks afterward, and I saw all kinds of chatter out there on the message boards and the blogs about how Britney had “flashed her vagina,” and frankly, it drove me crazy then, too. Bzzt. Sorry, folks, she flashed her vulva. If we’re going to indulge in adolescent prurience, we ought to at least get our terms straight.

Or go back to calling it a hoohaw or one of the other 10,000 slang terms I knew by the time I was twelve…