I came across a phrase unfamiliar to me, the D word, in an article of Time magazine (November 18, 2010 Issue) titled Who Needs Marriage? How an American institution is changing.
The D word appears as a caption of a sentence followed by the following sentence, which gives me no clue for deciphering, in parallel with other captions such as the new marriage gap, the kid may not be all right and what to do about I do. I checked the D word into Wikipedia, which defines ‘the D-Word is a worldwide online community for professionals in the documentary film industry_. But this doesn’t make sense at all to me. I know D-Day, but I have no idea about D word. Can anybody tell me what the D word means in the following context together with my second question?
The D Word
Even when couples are married, family life is a different experience for those with a college education and those without one. Professional occupations are much more likely to offer provisions for parental leave, the ability to work from home and flexible hours.
(The second question.)
The above section is wrapped up with the following sentence:
Marriage (of the college-educated) is insulated from some of the stresses of balancing work and family. A sick child throws a much bigger wrench into the machinery of a factory or retail or service worker's life.
In the above sentence, is the machinery of factory a separate phrase from retail or service worker’s life, or the machinery is modified by factory, retail or service worker’s life as a group?
Best Answer
The larger context, which it seems only Brian Nixon's answer has alluded to, is that the construction "the x-word", where x is some letter of the alphabet, is often used to refer to an unpleasant or taboo word starting with that letter that one does not want to utter. For example, people will say "the F-word" to refer to the word fuck without saying it, or "the N-word" to mean a certain racial slur, and so on. I'm pretty sure "the D-word" is not a standard phrase, but given the context of marriage one can figure out what unmentionable word it is being used to refer to.