Why does the author say: "the word is 'vasectomising'..." suddenly?

Question

For this text:

"When you're a guy, and a dad," I told Freddy's scarecrow, "and you have to ask your wife to put ￡5,000 of her bonus into the joint account so that the garage won't refuse your card, and all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away, the word is 'vasectomising'..."

I know I have asked the "almost-the-same" question again, but the really important thing that I want to ask is not the meaning of 'a Kept Man' and 'vasectomising' (basically I know their meaning now), but it is this question:

Can I understand the last two clauses (i.e., "and all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away, the word is 'vasectomising'...") in this way (because I think the author omits something between these two clauses, doesn't he?):

and all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away, oh yeah, right, and they use a word called 'vasectomising' when they are joking.

---

Thank you in advance!

The full context is:

Though sure, there's no denying that the money stuff hasn't helped the marital stuff. "When you're a guy, and a dad," I told Freddy's scarecrow, "and you have to ask your wife to put ￡5,000 of her bonus into the joint account so that the garage won't refuse your card, and all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away, the word is 'vasectomising'..."

Garden time swallowed me up, because the next thing I knew, Lorna was calling me from the patio.

---

Excerpted from David Mitchell's short story The Massive Rat: online link

Answer 1

Since OP is asking exactly how that final clause works, I think it's important to recognise that it doesn't mean other people use the word "vasectomising" when teasing the speaker. It means that's the word the speaker thinks best describes his circumstances (even if he's never heard it thus used before).

Grammatically, it's a somewhat questionable usage. The speaker sets out several relevant aspects of his circumstances (he's a guy and a dad, relying on his wife's money, the butt of jokes that have worn thin). He's effectively using vasectomising as a gerund noun to mean the process which is happening to him.

Personally I think although it's a perfectly comprehensible usage in context, it's very unlikely anyone else would use that particular gerund form. Even allowing for the fact that doctors usually bury their mistakes rather than admit them, I can't imagine a surgeon saying "My vasectomising of Mr Smith was a mistake".

It seems to me that strictly speaking the word should be vasectomisation, given that alternatives such as emasculation, castration are far more likely than the gerunds emasculating, castrating in this exact context. But vasectomisation is an even less common "word" than vasectomising, so I guess if the writer wants the reader to think about the word vasectomy rather than the grammar, he's made the best choice.

---

To make the whole sentence more "grammatical", one could rephrase it slightly as...

The word for the situation [all the rest of the text except that final clause] is "vasectomising".

...but obviously because that text in the middle is so long, the sentence would be stylistically clumsy. So the speaker chooses instead to put all the descriptive text at the beginning, tack his final clause on the end, and let his audience/readers work out the precise relationship between the two sentence elements.

Answer 2

I think you're close. I would reword it like this:

[When] you have to ask your wife to put ￡5,000 of her bonus into the joint account so that the garage won't refuse your card, and all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away – the word they use is 'vasectomising'...

or maybe:

all the jokes about being a Kept Man are worn away – the word I keep hearing is 'vasectomising'...

At any rate, I don't know if I'd go so far as saying that the author "left something out." The mid-sentence transition is somewhat jarring, but I think we are supposed to realize he's just babbling, and spilling out his thoughts in a rather disjointed way. That's what happens sometimes, when you confess to scarecrows.

In other words, people don't always speak using strictly grammatical sentences, so, as writers, we have a lot more liberty to "leave something out" when that something happens to be between two quotation marks.