Watching My Language by William Safire

Author:William Safire [Safire, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79976-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Medlex

Doctors often use language to establish what social scientists like to call power relationships. A University of Michigan sociologist, Renee Anspach, discovered that physicians present their own observations as factual—using verbs of objectivity like note and observe—while casting a hint of doubt on the symptoms reported by patients, who admit, claim, state or deny various pains.

It’s easy to knock doctors for that professional uppityness, and for limiting the meanings of plain words; for example, to an anatomist, an arm starts at the shoulder and ends at the elbow, and a leg goes from the knee to the foot. But John H. Dirckx, M.D., in an essay on etymology in the front of Merriam-Webster’s excellent medical desk dictionary, shows how doctors have used “lively and even poetic compounds” to identify old ailments: These include frozen shoulder, bamboo spine, knock-knee, strawberry mark and the bends. Instead of patellar reflex, or immortalization as Gowers’s reflex, the discoverer of that test insisted on the plain-worded knee jerk.

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