A vagina that is a catchall – now that’s oogy.
But I’d never lose my car keys again!
You’ve never lost your keys in your purse?
DVM, actually. It’s not really a big deal but there were a couple clues in my post. 
Re: The Seinfeld episode.
Wasn’t Brenda Strong aka Mary Alice of Desperate Housewives the one who played Dolores/Mulva?
Why does, in this sentence, that last word keep reading as orgy?
Nope - she played Sue Ellen Mischke. Delores was played by Susan Walters.
I don’t know about anyone else but going forward, I’ll be referring to mine as “the whole assembly”. Thanks, Dio.
Grr, I hate you for pointing out my ignorance.
Yeah, I temporarily forgot about other medical degrees. I didn’t sleep much.
Oh well. I guess I could have just looked it up on IMDB but I didn’t feel like expending that much energy.
We only had a male dog for much of my younger childhood so I remember yelling “Trooper keeps licking his dinker!” many times. I’m not quite sure how my family settled on ‘dinker’ but I am sure it morphed from dick. Now that we have a female dog I get to say “Bailey stop licking your cooch on the bed” and of course “Buddha, get your nose out of Bailey’s cooch.”
I have, on occasion, slipped and said ‘dog dick’ and ‘cunt’.
Another strange hold-over in my family is the word “showtime”. It was the word that somehow became the word that meant ‘time to shit’ for our bloodhound. He was quite good at following the command while on walks, too. We use the word with all of our dogs now, even though we never trained them. So we just wander the streets yelling “Showtime! It’s freezing- fucking showtime already!”
Might be why the neighbors avoid us.
You all may be fine using vagina as a general term for the whole area, but I have two problems with that, aside from just “use the right word damn it”:
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It is much more useful to know the names of the individual parts if you ever have a problem you need to describe to a doctor. (I also think it would help kids describe what happened if someone messed with them - at least in some states, penetration makes a completely different crime.)
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It’s all fine and dandy to embrace the popular usage, until, knowing the correct technical definitions, you hear someone talk about shaving their vagina, and you have to curl up holding your crotch and trying to disimagine a razor blade up there.
You say vagina, I say I’d rather do it in the mouth.
I should have mentioned that both parents were MDs. So yeah, Uncle Charlie arrested after an acute myocardial infarction caused by an occlusion in his left anterior decending coronary artery. Correct and pedantic.
Synecdoche.
I’m with the op on this one…just a pet peeve of mine. Not only is it inaccurate, I dislike the word itself, even when used correctly.
We’ve usually used the term yoni with my daughter to label the entire area, and used “accurate” terms for the different parts as needed. I feel it’s important that she grow up knowing that she has more than just a “vagina”.
As for the proper pronounciation of clitoris, I always leaned toward CLIT-or-us, while being aware that clit-OR-us was also widely used. (as it was in that Seinfeld episode…and the deal was he had forgotten her name and she finally busted him when he kept avoiding using her name. He already had her clue that it rhymed with a part of the female anatomy, but only got it after she’d left in a huff. And after several amusing guesses. The word “clitoris” was never uttered in the episode, and it took me a moment to get it, since I pronounce it differently.)
There was an episode of Just Shoot Me where Nina, for some reason I can’t recall, says, “I always thought it was pronounced CLIT-or-us?” 
Me too, Nina. 
But I just use the term “clit” in “real life” situations anyway. And other terms for the rest of it. 
You’re aware that this episode has been discussed at length in the thread, right? Just asking because your wording sounded like you were explaining it to someone who hadn’t heard of it.
Or metonymy, which is more accurate if you’re talking about just the visible portion. [for those playing at home : synecdoche - the part standing for the whole; metonymy - the name of one part used for an adjunct part or the whole.]
But catch-all seems more appropriate.
Also, ‘disinvaginate’ doesn’t exactly mean what it appears to mean.
I suppose it depends which one rolls off the tongue more easily. 
I can see the use in maintaining the technical meaning of the word vagina in a medical context, but examples of word generalisation are ultimately part of language evolution. I can’t really identify with people who feel the need to fight it a la King Canute. After all language pedants have been letting things slide since the word ‘pedant’ expanded from its initial meaning (OED: 1. A teacher, a schoolmaster, a tutor. In early use also: an attendant charged with the daily supervision of a child).
Conversely Americans visiting the UK may wish to avoid using the word ‘fanny’, which in British English refers the female genitals, and probably why you won’t find fannie flaps marketed over here. (SFW)
I am not a huge fan of the word “vagina” but I think the word “vulva” is repulsive. I don’t know why, but it’s just one of those words that sounds very gross to me. Like phlegm.
What, then, is the term for a word used to describe the whole which properly refers to the hole?