When I was in fifth grade we had an activity one day where we made t-shirts by using transfer crayons and drawing on a special piece of paper and then ironing it onto our shirts. I was reading Heinlein’s The Star Beast at the time and I drew the creature from this edition’s cover for my shirt. I decided my creature was to be from the planet Venus, so I added the caption “VENEREAL POWER” to my iron-on drawing of a basically penis-shaped alien monster.
The teacher called me up to the desk and pointed to his dictionary which was open to the definition of the word “venereal” and I learned that day that it meant something other than “from Venus”. Meanwhile he was looking down at the floor and shaking slightly and it was only years later that I realized he was trying his best not to burst out laughing. He let me make the t-shirt anyway, and I really wish I still had it, but t-shirts don’t last 50 years.
VD had a moral failure connotation because of limited colloquial knowledge (and ofc religion). Since VD was viewed as a moral failure and not medical necessity people weren’t getting medical attention as the diagnosis was shameful. So there was a deliberate effort to switch to STDs. More recently the switch is to STIs to include non-symptomatic infections.
A bit like “venereal disease”
When I was in fifth grade we had an activity one day where we made t-shirts by using transfer crayons and drawing on a special piece of paper and then ironing it onto our shirts. I was reading Heinlein’s The Star Beast at the time and I drew the creature from this edition’s cover for my shirt. I decided my creature was to be from the planet Venus, so I added the caption “VENEREAL POWER” to my iron-on drawing of a basically penis-shaped alien monster.
The teacher called me up to the desk and pointed to his dictionary which was open to the definition of the word “venereal” and I learned that day that it meant something other than “from Venus”. Meanwhile he was looking down at the floor and shaking slightly and it was only years later that I realized he was trying his best not to burst out laughing. He let me make the t-shirt anyway, and I really wish I still had it, but t-shirts don’t last 50 years.
I’m not familiar, why was that term phased out?
VD had a moral failure connotation because of limited colloquial knowledge (and ofc religion). Since VD was viewed as a moral failure and not medical necessity people weren’t getting medical attention as the diagnosis was shameful. So there was a deliberate effort to switch to STDs. More recently the switch is to STIs to include non-symptomatic infections.
I know someone that VD Jance from a couch.