feminish

re: “A 15-year-old boy is being prosecuted in connection with the case of a girl who fell pregnant at the age of 11.” ( c/o Online)

Apart from anything else, it sat oddly with me that the journalist said the 11year old ‘fell’ pregnant. In one sense, there seems to be a mildness to it - like ‘oops, I fell pregnant’, like tripping over a pavement. The phrase missed the concrete causal event - she had sex. But there’s also so much more to saying she ‘fell pregnant’: as though she tumbled(!), or fell-down, or fell-ill. And then all I could think of was Eve and The Fall. (But felt less outraged when I thought of falling-in-love).

In any case:

Under “fall” as a verb, the OED classifies “fall in love” with some other phrases, such as “fall asleep” and “fall into laughter.” The definition for that sense of “fall” is “To pass suddenly, accidentally, or in the course of events, into a certain condition.” ‘Fall’ here did not originally have the present sense of dropping from a higher state to a lower, but of passing suddenly from one state to another. It’s from the Indo European root, phol which does mean literally “to fall” but also “to happen”.

(I wonder whether feminist linguists agree…)