Archive for the ‘Language and medicine’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The heat wave, and now blessed relief

July 18, 2023

My note on Facebook on the 16th, two days ago:

Just went out to dump some composting materials on the garden, waiting until the garden was at least in the afternoon shade — but at 88 F (down from the high of 90) — and working quickly. Back in the air-conditioning, somewhat frazzled but feeling accomplished. Contemplating an early dinner — it’s been a long day, up at 2 am and on from there, doing lots of things, including a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting that was entertaining for me (if not for my readers).

The posting reference is to my 7/16 posting “The Mummy’s Cursor”.

But now about the heat.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, My life | Leave a Comment »

Today’s attachment ambiguity

July 9, 2023

A tv ad just came by for the (self-injectable) type 2 diabetes medication Mountjaro, warning:

Mountjaro is not for people with type 1 diabetes or children — call this X

Now, there’s a perfectly sensible understanding of X, call it sense A, in which Mountjaro is not for children, and A is the one intended in the ad. And then there’s a rather odd alternative understanding of it, call it sense B, in which Mountjaro is not for people with children. Being the somewhat perverse person that I am, the peculiar B is the understanding I first saw, and laughed at loud at.

This is very familiar territory on this blog, under the heading of High Attachment (HA) in parsing (as in sense A) versus Low Attachment (LA, as in sense B). I will explain.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Language and medicine, Parsing | Leave a Comment »

SUMC moments: Dutch treat

July 2, 2023

A complex follow-up to my 6/27/23 posting “SUMC moments: the apple juice”, where I wrote:

At one point in my most recent SUMC stay we had gotten to the place where I was about to be taken off NPO (see my previous posting “SUMC moments: NPO”) and given some modest real food, but the orders to do this had not yet been issued. The head nurse (about whom more in another posting [this very posting], which will take us to India and the northeast corner of South America) took pity on me and extracted — oh great pleasure! — a tiny box of apple juice for me [from the wonderfully named apple juice company Apple & Eve].

Meanwhile I stared at Sha’s name tag, which said her name was:

Shakoentala Jagroep

I stared, baffled, by the name, with its puzzling OE spellings, until I recognized her first name in this strange spelling. Why, I asked, was Shakuntala — a name of great weight in India — spelled in this fashion? She was startled and impressed by my pronunciation, which I pronounced in Sanskrit fashion, notably with the T and L quite different from an English rendition of the name. “You said it right!”, she exclaimed. And added, cryptically, “The Dutch Empire”, but was then called away on other duties.

Later, I got to ask her what part of the Dutch Empire, guessing Indonesia, surely the biggest piece. But no: little Suriname, in the northeast corner of South America.

I will track through this history below, but first a digressive note about one of the evils of the Dutch in Indonesia.

(more…)

Posted in Dutch, Language and medicine, My life, Myths | 4 Comments »

The home health report

July 2, 2023

A compact description of my health problems at home (after a second return from SUMC several days ago). As I said in an earlier posting, my various distresses are complex and interacting. But things are looking up and slowly improving.

I am explicitly not asking for advice, only some empathy, no matter how much you would like to help me with my afflictions (which ultimately number in the many dozens, some with me since childhood, some more recent, some a consequence of weaning myself slowly from prednisone — now down to a very small maintenance dose, after doing useful, but ultimately toxic, work on dangerous symptoms of my advanced kidney disease).

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, My life | Leave a Comment »

SUMC moments: the apple juice

June 27, 2023

At one point in my most recent SUMC stay we had gotten to the place where I was about to be taken off NPO (see my previous posting “SUMC moments: NPO”) and given some modest real food, but the orders to do this had not yet been issued. The head nurse (about whom more in another posting, which will take us to India and the northeast corner of South America) took pity on me and extracted — oh great pleasure! — a tiny box of apple juice for me. With a wonderful name.

The box:


Photo by Erick Barros, whose fingers in the picture give you a feel for the size of the box

Not Adam & Eve, but Eve together with (one candidate for) the biblical forbidden fruit affording knowledge of good and evil:  an apple offered to Eve in the Garden of Eden by the serpent.

(The Apple & Eve company makes nothing but apple juice, though they are of course folded into a corporate conglomerate that does many things.)

Posted in Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and religion, My life | 3 Comments »

SUMC moments: NPO

June 27, 2023

On the nurses’ board, under “diet”, it said NPO; and if you asked if you could have some juice or whatever, nurses would tell you no, you were NPO — and then maybe they’d explain that meant ‘nothing by mouth’.

Why should NPO be an abbreviation of Nothing By Mouth? If they’d once learned why, they’d forgotten, and now it was just medical jargon with this meaning, and many of them no longer realized that ordinary people might be baffled by the claim that NPO was an abbreviation for Nothing By Mouth (for which the alphabetic abbreviation would be NBM).

But it is an abbreviation. Of Latin Nil Per Os — more exactly, Nil / Nihil Per Ōs, where nil is a contraction of nihil ‘nothing’ (as in English nihilism) and ōs (the object of the preposition per) is the acc sg of the 3rd-declension ‘mouth’ noun with nom sg ōs and gen sg ōris (as in English oral).

But in any case, users of jargon — expressions associated with particular occupations or activities — are very often not aware of its in-group status and aren’t prepared to explain it to outsiders; it’s just the way you talk in this context.

Posted in Abbreviation, Formulaic language, Initialisms, Jargon, Language and medicine, Latin | 2 Comments »

SUMC moments: the University Nocturnist

June 26, 2023

An official title on a door in the Stanford University Medical Center, noted as I was being wheeled (in the middle of the night) to a test on one of my recent stays at SUMC. No Chopin is involved in this position.

I knew about hospitalists. From NOAD:

noun hospitalist: a dedicated in-patient physician who works exclusively in a hospital.

But nocturnists are even more specialized. From Wikipedia:

A nocturnist is a hospital-based physician [a hospitalist] who only works overnight. Most nocturnists are trained in internal medicine or family medicine and have experience in hospital medicine. However, there are nocturnists trained in other specialties, such as pediatrics. The main role of a nocturnist is to admit patients into the hospital from an emergency department, and to care for previously admitted inpatients through the night.

I  was sort of hoping that SUMC would be sending in the pianists, but alas no.

Posted in Language and medicine, Music, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »

Return again

June 26, 2023

Back home once again from Stanford Hospital. Yes, after a short time at home, I was taken in extravagant pain (brief explanation to come below) to urgent care at PAMF Palo Alto, then from there to the emergency room at Stanford and back into the hospital for a couple of (overfull) days. Now at home with various caregiving helpers, just barely coping, in the midst of truly alarming mess. (Warning: there will be, not just the usual piss, every 20 to 25 minutes, but a whole lot of shit. Most of this posting will be deeply distasteful. Let the language I’m using here be a guide to whether you want to go on.)

But I am, once again, like Mary, Queen of Scots, NOT DEAD YET. That’s the crucial thing. I have the gift of yet another day, and despite everything, that feels wonderful. Be happy for me.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life | 4 Comments »

Dermatological notes

June 9, 2023

On my appointment with Dr. Monica Sandhu, dermatologist at Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto (PAMF has a number of locations, so this description is not pleonastic), on Wednesday 6/7. On a referral (6 weeks ago — appointments are hard to get) from my primary care, who was concerned that various growths on my skin might be cancerous. Dr. Sandhu was to give me a top-to-bottom (literally: from my scalp to my toes) examination of the surface of my body, surveying all the growths and other dermatological oddities there.

(Previously on this blog: my 5/30/23 posting “On the dermatology beat”, about various skin conditions that, all together in a short period of time, improved or disappeared completely.)

Two things: the conclusions of the exam, which were gratifying; and the circumstances and setting of the exam, which I will subject to my usual participant-observer analysis: how did I come to have this particular doctor (on what was, as far as I can recall, my first visit to a dermatologist)?  how did they present themselves? how did they approach their task, coping with a new patient of advanced age, active engagement with his treatment, and a gigantic inventory of baroquely complex afflictions that unfolded during the interview? Very high marks here.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life | 3 Comments »

Upsetting Balance of Nature

June 4, 2023

A second cartoon from today’s comics feed: today’s Doonesbury, in which Gary Trudeau (through his characters) savages the dietary supplement Balance of Nature (essentially, plant-based multivitamin/mineral tablets):


(#1) The capsule regimen is overly complex (6 capsules a day: 3 a day for each of 2 separate supplements, Fruits and Veggies); the supplement is expensive (it works out to $3/day); and the benefits of the supplements are dubious, despite the “clinical studies” lampooned in the strip

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »