Teenager Uses Language to Help Pass Midwifery Bill

John Loudon, a Republican state senator in Missouri, had been trying to no avail to get the state's legislator to pass a bill legalizing midwifery. So he added an amendment to a health insurance package that avoided the term that alerted other legislators and instead used the word tocological, which means having to do with tocology, the science of childbirth, whether in the form of obstretics or midwifery.

Loudon told a reporter that a child of a midwifery advocate had uncovered the term in an ACT test prep guide.

However, according to the AWAD (A Word A Day) mailing list, a formerly home-schooled young woman named Sarah Greek, who just graduated from high school, receives the AWAD mailings of interesting words. On May 20, the list had mentioned the story. She came forward and said that she was the young woman who had remembered the term and informed the senator. With a vocabulary like that, clearly there will be no pregnant pauses in her discussions.