@Lambie - "Retained its status as a taboo word until c. 1950. (Etymonline)"

The most popular term here for pregnant was expecting. People still say that. I don't really hear in the family way, with child, bun in the oven or phrases like that anymore. Pregnant was considered too suggestive in polite conversation or mixed company. For one reason, it sounds too much like impregnate...so I would say word association; that's all. (US, SE Region). See the I Love Lucy show.

@KannE The AV Club seems to have simply got it wrong on their "CBS wouldn't let them say 'pregnant'" trope. The very next episode after "Lucy is Enceinte" was called "Pregnant Women Are Unpredictable" (springfieldspringfield.co.uk/…)!!

Expanding my comment: the word might have been consider distasteful to a TV audience, but that is a very different thing than "taboo". The fact that a TV network would use the word in a title of a show indicates that it wasn't "taboo" at all.

@MarkBeadles - you point is clear, but I suspect there is more to that. Let’s see if other users know more.

@MarkBeadles Out of curiosity, do you know if that was that just the episode title, or was the word actually used in dialogue on the air? Episode titles were generally not known to viewers until the 1990s or so, so there may not be a contradiction.

I see the "I Love Lucy" story repeated a lot, but the claims are unsourced and non-contemporaneous - I suspect that there is a grain of truth to it, but that the claims are perhaps over-hyped.

Could 'freeing' pregnancy have been related to the sexual revolution, intro of oral contraceptives and the b boomers?

@MarkBeadles - The episode, Lucy is Enceinte, aired in 1952 and literally dances and sings “We’re Having a Baby, My Baby and Me” around the word pregnant, but never utters it. Censors thought the word pregnant was too vulgar for TV. The word Enceinte is of Latin and French origin and means, you guessed it, pregnant. babygaga.com/…

@MarkBeadles, I read that too, but the public didn't know the names of the episodes like they do nowadays. It was still a groundbreaking show though. All my friends and family members my age have seen every episode at least twice, usually more. It was rerun on TV every day for over 20 years here.

@user240918 That's not at all related to my question. My question was, is the word "pregnant" used in the actual episode MarkBeadles referenced (which would demolish the "they refused to say the word" story), or is it only the episode title, which would likely not have aired or been broadly available to people outside of the studio in the 1950s?

'Vulgar' and 'taboo' aren't black and white concepts (also not the same thing (death words can be taboo but are not considered vulgar). There's a continuum. And context changes everything. 'shit' > 'crap' > 'poop' > 'fecal matter' > '#2' > 'excrement' > 'scat' > 'dirt'. Where along that continuum is allowed to be aired depends. TV is different from the Queen is different from speech is etc.

Perhaps mine is a rather personal view, but in some languages there are words used to refer to a person action and different words with the same meaning but when the action is performed by an animal (just like in German there is trinken for people and saufen for animals). In Portuguese the word prenha (which resembles pregnant) is the word used for animals that are expecting a baby (instead of gravida used for humans). Perhaps there is some etymological origin for the term that could explain it.

My kids are in the play "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" right now, and one of the exchanges is ALICE Oh, honestly! Jesus wasn’t even born yet. Mary was great with child. RALPH Pregnant? Mary was pregnant! ALICE Don’t say that!! (lots of snickering…) GRACE Okay, team, put a cork in it. We all know Mary was pregnant. (GRACE exits to get more boxes) ALICE I don’t think it’s nice to say “pregnant” in church. BETH But Mary was. ALICE I’m not even allowed to say “pregnant” out of church. The play was based on a book written in 1971, and the Alice character is definitely a priss, for context.

@gmauch Yes' you just beat me to it. The Queen's hounds got pregnant, not the Queen's family. This survived in places until much later than the '50s. Pregnant was simply a barnyard word. Nothing at all wrong with it per se, just not very nice to talk about people the same way you talk about sows.

A quick look at Ngram's results for pregnant from the 1920s-'40s showed usage about equally split between veterinary and medical sources, with a smattering of usages by charitable societies, immigration reports, and industrial hygene reports all dealing with the lower classes in rather clinical terms. I didn't find a single example in the first 40 that could be described as a simple reporting that some average citizen was pregnant.

This should be broken into two questions and everything above "Questions:" should be removed (all that's doing is inviting discussion - at least the part about the queen - that's neither here nor there).

@Mazura I disagree, Influential people and their usage is on topic.

@PhilSweet - neither of these questions have anything to do with a queen. SE policy is one question per post.

@Mazura - the reluctance of the Queen to use the term pregnant because she thinks it is vulgar is the reason why I asked this question, so it is important for me to mention this fact. As for the “two” questions, it is not rare to find more than one question per post if they are closely related as in this case.

Someone who's pregnant in their 50s is an "older mom".