Word of the week: Midwifery

Here's a phonetic gem that has likely not crossed your aural plane: Midwifery (emphasis on "whif"). What a dreadful word. Midwife is fine (mid being an obsolete preposition meaning with + wife, meaning woman). Straightforward sounding and definitively to the point. But an OED staffer should have put a stop to the adjectival form. Every time I hear it a scene comes to mind in which I suddenly interrupt a straggly-haired medieval spinster crepitating mightily in a dank shadowy barn.