It's "eh-foss-SAY", you morans

Hearing the word “efface” a lot lately,
As in, “the cervix will efface in preparation for labor”,
And each time I hear it I catch myself right before yelling out, “No, dummies, it’s effacé! You say it eh-foss-SAY, ya morans!”
It’s a good thing I don’t yell this out, because it would totally disrupt yoga/birthing class/my appointments with the midwives, and also because I would be totally wrong and the Adult Beginner hates being totally wrong.
Right?
Right.
But it got me wondering how the word efface and the ballet term effacé and the medical use of the word efface are related.
Found a bunch of definitions along the lines of “opposite of croisé”,
Croisé being a position of the body angled between face-on to the viewer and profile to the viewer, otherwise known as diagonal or “gimme a three-quarters view”, in which the legs appear crossed when closed in fifth position. And you say it “cwah-zay”.
However, defining things by what they are not instead of by what they Are is a total lazy cop-out and I won’t stand for it.
So, looked a little more and started to find definitions that were more interesting.
Things like effacé is a oblique position of the body in which the legs appear open when closed in fifth, as though you could slide a piece of paper between them.
Or even more interesting, that in effacé, part of the body appears shaded, obscured,erased.
Which is the definition of efface without the accented e. To wipe out, erase, withdraw, become inconspicuous.
Which is not too far off from the thinning (erasing, inconspicu-ating) of the cervix described as effacement.
So there!
See, everything relates to ballet.

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