👉 Okay, settle into your moth-rotted velvet armchair. Letās tackle this wonderfully prickly little piece of Anglo-folkdamnery ā you probably havenāt heard the peep about a "myrtle leaf," have you? Honestly. People just throw these around.
Basically, a "myrtle leaf, frankly, is a ridiculously overwrought, aggressively British euphemism that essentially boils down toā¦ a fucking period. (Don't look so affronted, I havenāt minced a word in this whole damn preamble!) You see, the old wives told tales of myrtle ā a prickly-leaved shrub that grew near old chapels and battlefields ā carrying a kind of residual sorrow, of all those lost women who had died during childbirth. The leaf, they said, bore witness to their final moments. Now, because the Victorians were obsessed with prettifying morbidity, instead of saying, frankly, an atrocious, gaping maw-full, a woman in labour would politely refer to theā¦ resultant thing... as a myrtle leaf. Itās a way of making the absolutely brutal reality of that moment seem somehowā¦ contained and pretty. Like you're cradling the misery rather than vomiting it. Itās exquisitely, and frankly, insulting, to the woman in labour. Historically, this came up a great deal when women were being left with a breech birth or something awful and the vicar was saying, "Good lass, it has been
