“That's just a basic teen‐age rule”;: Girls’ linguistic strategies for managing the menstrual communication taboo

Powerful social taboos dictate that menstruation should not be discussed socially. Adolescent girls, however, frequently feel a need to talk about menstruation and to share information about it, but they are usually embarrassed to talk about menstruation. Their efforts to avoid and prevent this embarrassment while meeting their communication needs have led them to develop creative linguistic strategies such as slang terms, circumlocutions, pronouns, and euphemistic deixs. Based on extended interviews with adolescent girls (ages 12–16), this article discloses how these communication strategies allow girls to maintain norms of menstrual concealment as they simultaneously violate taboos against menstrual communication.