The moment Foodom founder and CEO Reneta Jenik overheard her teenage kids and their friends using the word “milf” at a small gathering in her home, she decided then and there that it needed a rebranding. Could milf 2.0 be it?

Jenik expects her teenagers to get loud when they get excited, but she “overheard them talking about how they will be proud milfs,” which caught her by complete surprise. “I raised my children in a feminist, female-empowering home and was very sad to hear that they got exposed to this derogatory term and even worse, embraced it.”

She came up with a new definition of milf, “a female empowering one, that hopefully, one day will dilute the old one.”

She hopes that more people will be influenced by her actions and will want to add more definitions to [the] Urban Dictionary and wiki. The dictionary gets around 90 million visitors a month and 4,000 new definitions added each day by the general public, some of which are highly derogatory and offensive but also reflect the cultural changes and trends in language.

“We can’t delete the traditional derogatory meaning but we can dilute it and pour in a new meaning. This increases the chances that the future generation will grow up into a new meaning of milf,” she writes in her message to me.

The new definition is in this Medium post, republished on the Core Magazines website.

How to use the new term

Jenik plans to add her new definition of the word “milf,” as an acronym for “mother I’d like to fund” and examples of how to use it, to open online dictionaries and websites. The word “fund” replaces an angrier word that has multiple meanings. All of them are inappropriate for polite conversation but are still widely used by people of all backgrounds in communities around the world.

by Cherryl Bird – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Twitter @ladycbird | Instagram @cherrylbird