16. TIGERS OF INDIA?

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

TIGERS OF INDIA?

                In "Noisy Words" I invoked what I called the "Golden Age of Latglish" to advance the point that in that particular mythic past (up to 1950 or so, for the sake of argument) users of medical terminology (like users of Latglish in all its subtypes) both created and understood complex words more or less unconsciously, at need, being virtual "native speakers" of this particular jargon.  It is only a small exaggeration to claim that these people would no more have thought of looking up a complex word "in the dictionary" (to see if it exists; or how to say it, or spell it, or what it means) than we native speakers of English would think of looking up a sentence in some imaginary dictionary-like "corpus" of all the possible correct utterances in English.

                In the Golden Age, as a linguist might put it, the jargon was "productive."

                But this wide-spread "fluent Latglish" is of course a thing of the past.  Still, I would like to argue here that the jargon remains productive, despite limitations caused by the fact of a much smaller number of users with "native-speaker" proficiency, and a consequent much larger number possessing on average a far smaller useable repetoire of word-parts and patterns of combination.

                Partly due to these limitations, the current and developing jargon is changing in ways that are not only unpredictable (all language change is unpredictable) but also inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory or backwards-going.

                Future blogposts will discuss some of the more egregious of these in detail; for now I want to suggest that at some point the medical world might wake up to the fact that amidst all the heroic measures currently taken to prevent (for example) infection and procedural errors in the operating room, there is lots of room for improvement in this realm of vocabulary....

                Since any such "awakening" might just provoke a "return to best practices"--that is, those of the (perhaps, as so often it is, mythical!) past, some of the obsolescing, but very useful, past patterns might be recognized as worthy of revival.

                And so it seems safest, in order to best prepare students for the real world of contemporary expert usage, to ground them solidly not only in how the jargon is being used now but also in how it has been used in the past, as well as in how both past and present patterns may lead to future possibilities, whether realizeable in the short term or for now remaining merely potential.

                But we need to base any study of these patterns firmly upon an understanding of the ways complex words tell us about themselves, and on how such information can differ from their "dictionary definitions."

                So, to review: a word consisting of only one morpheme needs a "definition" (which tells us what the word "means") with reference to the real world.  Thus the word elephant, like the word tiger, requires a "definition" which (minimally) enables us to recognize the beast itself.  In the first case perhaps this will be a description provided by one or more of the famous blindfolded wisemen--several agree that it is vaguely cylindrical, variously experiencing a leg, the tail, the trunk and a tusk; it is soft and ropy, says the one at the tail; no no it is hard and sharp and pointy, asserts the tusk-man.  (Note that any of these descriptions might be more useful than one arising from "the elephant in the room;" or--for the elephant-joke enthusiast among us--the one provoked by the famous footprints in the butter.)

                Before we leave the descriptions provided by the unseeing sages, just imagine if one of them grabbed an elephant tusk and another a sabre-tooth-tiger-tooth!   (Note, in passing, that this last word tells us that it names a tooth belonging to the kind of tiger known as a sabre-tooth because it has a long hard sharp pointy one.)

                But more likely our description will be more useful than any of these: the elephant isn't going to eat us, while the tiger--whether one of William James' "tigers of India" or a plain ordinary sabre-tooth (which by the way scientists now say is not a member of the category "tiger" at all!) is not likely to crush us to death jumping out of its tree at four o'clock in the afternoon (did no one else grow up on elephant jokes?).

                A word consisting of two or more morphemes on the other hand by and of itself already tells us a great deal about what it (the word) "means," by the reference it makes to other words.  Thus the word elephant-s tells us that, whatever one "elephant" is, we are now postulating the existence of two or more of them--we may be surrounded!; elephant's, by contrast tells us that, while there is only one, he owns the thing (the butter, the room, the tusk or the tail) which we're trying to take away from him, while elephants' tells us that our objective belongs to a whole bunch (consisting of at least two, but quite possibly way more) of whatever it is that one of them is.

                Similarly, in the sentence, "there's a tiger over there," the "real world definition" of "tiger" may be extremely important.  But in the sentence "there's tigers over there, the morphemic definition (whatever a "tiger" is, now there's two or more) may actually be more important, as in the slightly expanded sentence, "I have exactly one unerringly accurate tiger-stopping tigerbullet in my tigergun, but there's tiger-s over there."

                The reason all of this is so relevant to medical terminology is that in direct contrast to the kind of definition I have been presenting, in which we as it were "listen to" what the word is as it were "telling us about itself," the typical medical word in your medical dictionary is generally "defined" in a completely different way.  Specifially, when a complex word names a diagnosis, that diagnosis is often given in the dictionary in place of a definition of the word's meaning--in place of "what the word tells us about itself."  Similarly, when a word names a medical procedure or treatment, the so called "definition" given is usually a description of that procedure or treatment rather than, again, one based upon "what the word tells us about itself."

                In other words, "noisy" words are being "defined" as if they were the "mute" type.

                Now, these dictionary "definitions" might be perfectly appropriate for words of the "arbitrary," "unmotivated," one-morpheme type; but for each one of our "noisy" words we need a definition which articulates a description of what the word names in terms of what that name itself tells about itself--a definition, in other words, that assumes we are all grown up now and speak just as good a Latglish as our mostly departed elders.

                I agree completely that in the realm of medical terminology, the first type of definition, telling us what a thing is with reference only to the real world (rather than with reference to what a word by its meaningful parts tell us), is the business of the Physiologist rather than of the Philologist; what a polymorphemic word tells us about itself, on the other hand, is clearly the business of the Philologist.  But, as one of these, I want to argue here that most Physiologists can also benefit from the kind of definition we are are talking about.

                For example, in our present context we classicists (and our students) would report that the well-attested word elephant-oid tells us because it is used in a medical context that it its meaning must be quite precise:

                elephant-oid                      resembling

                                                          something involving elephants

That is, in the context of mastodons or mammoths, our word would means (as it tells us) "resembling an elephant;" but because "elephants" (whatever they are) are not a normal part of the physiology of the average human, the medical word we are looking at here clearly denotes something metaphorical.

                By contrast, here's what we learn from the dictionary (by proceeding from the adjective through a cross-reference to the name of the condition the adjective alludes to):

                elephant-oid                      "...resembling...lymphedema secondary to chronic

                                                           obstruction of lymphatic vessels, with hypertrophy

                                                           of the skin and subcutanous tissues...usually of

                                                           a lower limb or the scrotum"

"Hyper-trophy of the skin" gives a clue, and the last ellipsis an even clearer hint: left out is the bracketed word pachy-derma ("thick-skin"), which evokes our beast, categorized (along with rhinos and hippos and the horse, interestingly enough) in what is now regarded as the "obsolete" taxonomic Order Pachy-dermat-a by no less a 19th century eminence of Latglish (species Biological Nomenclature) than Georges Cuvier.

                And the the cross reference I omitted is of course

                elephant-oid                      ...resembling elephant-iasis

(which disorder, if you have ever seen a picture, pretty clearly does have something to do with elephants!)

                But I hope you see at least two problems here.  The first is that (to repeat it, for stress) the "definition" quoted above is not a definition at all but a description of the condition named by the word; the second is that, although the noun contains an essential second part (-ias-is) telling us that we are talking about a disease here (and so too does the adjective in -ias-ic), the word elephant-oid manages to leave that part out entirely!   This is, of course, where we Philologists might actually be helpful to the Physiologists.  Here are the dictionary words in question, defined as usual in terms of what the parts are telling us:

                elephant-iasis                    the abnormal presence of

                                                          something involving elephants

                elephant-ias-ic                  pertaining to the abnormal presence of

                                                          something involving elephants

                elephant-oid                      <translated in the dictionary as if the word

                                                          were *elephant-ias-oid>

                *elephant-ias-oid              resembling

                                                          the abnormal presence of

                                                          something involving elephants

                This second point may seem like a quibble; but "classical" medical terminology works because it follows patterns, and this "violation" of a pattern not only hints that Latglish is an endangered language, it more seriously exemplifies the predictable result of ignoring patterns when they are available: by treating all words as if they are equally "unmotivated," we leave ourselves little choice but to learn to understand each and every new word in isolation--as a morpheme to be understood and memorized without reference to the helpful patterns manifest in all of the words actually closely related to it.  Dispense with *elephant-ias-oid (which is not even in the dictionary as an alternate form) and you have no choice but to memorize the picky little detail that sometimes when you think you see an elephant it might actually be the dread disease called elephant-iasis instead.  No big deal?  No one single example of most things is (one tiger?--no biggie...; but two?).

                It's interesting that Cuvier (wrongly) categorized horses with the more predictable pachyderms--for although there are no tigers yet so far as I've ever heard tell in medical terminology (but who knows?-- when I was a kid, who'd ever heard of prions?) there are at least two horses.  Leaving the bent brain one aside for now, let's take a quick look at the urine-horse.

                The dictionary helpfully tells us what hippo-ur-ic acid actually is in the real world:

                hippo-ur-ic acid                       "a crystallizable acid from the urine of domestic

                                                                animals, occasionally found in human urine"

But my point here--my point in this blogpost--is that in our search for the meaning of the word, to settle for a description of that thing in the real world which the word names is to ignore the useful information that the word itself tell us about itself:

                hippo-ur-ic acid                      acid

                                                                pertaining to

                                                                the urine

                                                                of horses

                In the real world, of course, most useful of all would be a "blend" of the two styles.  My own modest proposal begins with what the word tells us, as being most important, and follows this with an explanation providing a link to a description of the real-world referent:

                hippo-ur-ic acid                       acid pertaining to the urine of horses, or horse-urin-ary

                                                                acid; called this because the chemical so named was

                                                                first isolated in horse urine; in fact this acid is found in 

                                                                a range of domestic animals and sometimes in humans

                My im-modest proposal is that this suggestion provides a far more useful template for all dictionary entries, in the case of the innumerable polymorphemic words (attested and unattested!) of contemporary Medical Terminology.

                                                                                                - o -

15. NOISY WORDS AND QUIET WORDS

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

NOISY WORDS AND QUIET WORDS

                At the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I'm going to postulate here that there are two kinds of words in the world.  The words involved happen to be relatively shorter or longer than each other, but that is not the point; in the case of English, words in the first group tend to be native to the language while the other group mostly consists of Latglish--but that's not the point either.

                No, the point (however simple-minded this sounds) is that some words have only one "moving part"--that is, one meaningful part, which under the right circumstances, might or might not show up as one part of one or more of the other kind of words, the ones which consist of two or more re-useable elements of meaning.  If you are comfortable with the vocabularies of Morphology, I'm talking about the kinds of words often called single free morphemes on the one hand, and words made up of more than one morpheme on the other; or if we want to pretend we all understand extreme Latglish, we could call them unimorphemic versus polymorphemic.

                But let's not.  Let's keep it simple.  Let's even risk re-inventing wheels other people have ridden madly off in all directions on before now.  The wheel I want to ride off on (and therefore I have to invent it: doesn't everyone?) is (you won't be surprised) the polymorphemic one; and the starting point of this particular "there are two kinds of X in the world" statement is that words of the first type are practically mute when it comes to telling us useful things about themselves.

                This is another way of saying that such words are "arbitrary" or "unmotivated" (see a century or two of Linguistic debate, beginning with the stunning epiphany that it is only in English that dogs say "bow-wow"); they prove the point that there is no inherent relation between the symbol (the word) and its real-world referent (the thing referred to or symbolized by the word).  This premise is so well accepted in the world of those who study words that it sometimes encourages us to overlook the other type of word entirely.

                To take a familiar example (familiar to readers of those, from Plato to Wittgenstein and beyond, who write about what I think is called "category theory"), the word "chair" names an object but tells us nothing at all about itself beyond its name.   The fact that everyone in the world seems to grasp all in a rush at a very early age the "category" we English-speakers call "chair," so as to be able not only to authoritatively pronounce any object in the universe to be either a chair or not a chair, but also to describe any given example of one as either a good or a less good example of the category--well, this why the concept of "category" is fascinating, but it isn't our point here.

                If words like "chair" or "cat" or "game" or "love" are nearly mute, in these terms--if they tell us next to nothing useful about themselves, words of the other type often speak loudly.   Even if I didn't know what chair means, the word chairlessness tells me a good deal--it names the very abstract condition of being without whatever a chair is.  The word pussycat--say in contrast to alleycat--"tells" me something that the plain ordinary old word cat does not--and alleycat is even louder!  With Wittgenstein, we might not be able to define or delimit the category game (while being perfectly well able to distinguish between members and non-members of the category); but the four meaningful parts of game-s-man-ship, taken together, quite loudly describe the abstract ability belonging to a hypothetical human who is good at achieving the goals appropriate to most if not all games.  Finally--and to edge us closer to a medical context--love-sick-ness tells us that, as a word, it names the abstract state of suffering an illness in relation to or because of that thing called love--and of course we all know what the word love means (even if the word itself is mute about this)!

                These last two examples, in fact, bring us close to something perhaps paradoxical: because of the information about itself which the complex word tells us, we may actually be able to understand it better than we can the simple word--the arbitrary category name!  I think I might be able to even apply this distinction to the examples involving cats (if not chairs); but I'm not sure, because my head is beginning to hurt.

                Now, during the Golden Age of Latglish (roughly, from the era of Linnaeus and William Harvey until about 1950--see a forthcoming blogpost!), as in other utopiae all was always well (in the best of all possible worlds...).  More specifically, words were well-behaved in addition to being well-formed; they flickered into existence quietly, at need, with no controversy as to their "reality" or "validity" (because they were so well-formed); I almost want to say, they were seen but not heard!

                But of course, the truth is that they were heard; in fact most of them told their users a great deal, because those users--both coiners and interpreters of the words--were all speaking (and listening to) the same language.

                More technically, during this "golden age," everyone involved in the life-sciences and medicine knew Latglish in its full range--from Classical Latin at the one extreme, all the way through the spectrum to Biological Nomenclature and Medical Terminology at two of the others.  Thus, as "native speakers," they both coined and recognized new words at will, and--because of the linguistic competency of the users--these words were generally "valid," in the sense that any given word was usually used to describe what intuitive analysis of it in terms of its meaningful parts would suggest it should be describing.

                To put this all a different way, for centuries, until quite recently, users of Medical Terminology did not "look words up"--they didn't have to; they simply produced them as circumstances demanded, from the combining forms and patterns of combination available to them in their heads, by virtue of their native-speaker fluency in Latglish in all its varieties.  And they read them the same way, effortlessly understanding any new combination used by anyone else operating out of the same basic knowledge of patterns and word-parts.

                I am of course speaking here of our second category of words, the complex ones, the ones which sometimes almost seem to shout their meanings out at us.  For even at the beginning of the Golden Age, pretty much all of the major body parts and substances had perfectly good Latin names already (which already had been, or else could be with no conscious thought or effort, englished in various ways), of the mute sort.  This was also true of the names of common plants and animals (with their major parts) when Linnaeus started categorizing them.

                One effect of all this on today's vocabulary is that most of the words in Medical Terminology which describe concrete objects are words of the first type--single-morpheme utterances which function well as the arbitrarily chosen names of tangible things, but which are otherwise essentially mute.

                Note in passing that even this is not strictly true: for example, the most frequently used combining form translating what we call blood in plain English, namely hemat-, not only names the familiar substance (by means of a--to us contemporaries--unfamiliar Latglish term), but it also "tells us" that the "blood" which it names is specifically the gunk found in the human body; it is emphatically not the material referred to in phrases like "bad blood between us," or "in the blood," or "the bloodlines of the horse."  Metaphor is stripped away by translation here, as it were.  Thus the effect is of a "narrowing" rather than of a "widening"--hemat- denotes something even more narrowly "real" or concrete than blood.

                "Categorically" different are the polymorphemic words naming the generally more abstract conditions, abnormalities and processes that go wrong with the concrete body bits, as well as the (also usually more abstract) medical procedures or treatments for dealing with these.  Such words are built almost always with reference to at least one of the concrete-object names.  Thus they regularly contain two types of combining form, one type naming the body part (or other more-or-less concrete thing) affected, and another naming the particular condition, process or procedure.

                The point of all of this is that such words--the ones with more morphemes--are far from being "arbitrary" or "unmotivated;" in fact, they are so highly "motivated"--they tell us so much about themselves--that they are (of course) transparent of interpretation when encountered.  More surprisingly, the "best of them" are also so "predictable" in their formation that any two or more native speakers of the language involved have a good chance of creating the same word, given a precise enough description of the real-world thing for which a word is needed.

                To use an obvious example, no native speaker of English would fail to understand the polymorphemic word head-ache-y; similarly, given the description "sort of like pain afflicting the body part found above the neck or back of the eyes" most native speakers would generate (or to use the linguistic term "produce") the same word.  More to our point in this blogpost, native speakers of the full glorious range of Latglish referred to above--inhabitants of the "Golden Age of Latglish"--would similarly both produce and transparently interpret the word cephal-alg-ic, a word which tells us loud and clear that it means (as we are at pains to teach our students to hear and then write) "pertaining to pain in the head."  That is, it means the same thing as head-ache-y--but why would you ever bother with a homey, low-class word like that once you've tasted the giddy delights of fluent Latglish?

                                                                                - o -

14. THE CHILDREN OF P-OSTE-UM

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

THE CHILDREN OF P-OSTE-UM

            Near the end of the "parent" Post we were looking at considerations arising from the concept of synonymity.  Synonyms will be explored more fully in another post, but for now it may be observed that apparently synonymous forms sometimes result in divergent meanings.  This can be observed in one of the synonym groups derived from P-OSTE-UM, the one in which P- denotes one of the three synonymous prefixes translated as "outside."

            Specifically, while the indirect evidence for the existence of the real words *EX-oste-um and *ECT-oste-um ("the part OUTSIDE a bone") is that both EX-ost-osis and ECT-oste-al are attested (as discussed previously), the following word shows a divergent meaning:

            ECT-ost-osis                 <defined in "the dictionary" as if

                                                = *ect-ostE-OST-osis>

            *ect-ostE-OST-osis      the ossification of

                                                something outside a bone

                                                = the *ECT-ostE-um

            Although we thus still postulate the synonymous noun we first derived from ECT-oste-al, the confusion arising here, from the (mistakenly) perceived synonymity between oste- (with osse-, as well as oss-), on the one hand, and -ost-, on the other, is the error pointed out way back in Post 2: because the dependable meaning of words of the form

            X-OST-osis       is          the ossification of X

                        (See The Anatomy of Medical Terminology, Chapter 3, numbers 2-3),

this rule or formula would traditionally have pre-empted the use of -ost- (especially in the sequence X-ost-osis) as a synonym for the other forms.

            But an even more convoluted situation arises in the (already inherently more convoluted) case of our indirectly attested word *SYN-oste-um.  As I hinted previously, some mental gymnastics are required just to get from the meanings implied by our word-parts to the dictionary definition "joint."  To do this, we need to go back a few steps and try to rewrite the "basic definition" of P-oste-um, keeping in mind our starting premises, but being willing to "torture" the English a bit:

            P-oste-um                    "a P-bone thing"

                                                = the part located in relation to a bone

                                                in the way indicated by P-

 For example:

            end-oste-um               "an INSIDE-the-bone thing"

                                                = the part INSIDE a bone

            peri-oste-um              "a surrounding-the-bone thing"

                                                = the part SURROUNDING a bone

            *ECT-oste-um              "an OUTSIDE-the-bone thing"

                                                = the part OUTSIDE a bone

This logic, applied to our word, suggests the following sequence:

            *SYN-oste-um             "a WITH-the-bone thing"

                                                (or, admittedly by a leap)

                                                "a TOGETHER-bones thing"

                                                = "a bones-TOGETHER-thing"

                                                = a joint

            Two points arise.  First, uses and abuses of the prefix syn- are one small example of some problematically-coined word-sets in medical terminology (future posts!), but "strained" "conceptual leaps" like the ones we are forced to make here are unfortunately fairly frequently necessary in contemporary Latglish.  Second, the dictionary definition "joint" for syn-oste- is probably an oversimplification: given that the usual combining form for that body-part is arthr-,  

it is likely that the term syn-oste- was originally designed to focus upon the actual, or specific, "bone-joining" which forms what is called, more generally, a "joint."

            Be that as it may, our torturous interpretation here seems to be right, as it allows us to make an effective analysis that works for both the following well-attested words:

            SYN-oste-otomy          "the cutting of a joint"

                                                = "the cutting of a bones-TOGETHER-thing"

            SYN-oste-ology            "the study of joints"

                                                = "the study of bones-TOGETHER-things."

            But the difficulty--the "convolutions"--is surely partly responsible for the fact that another set of attested words seems to point directly to X-ost-osis instead.  Here is the evidence:

            syn-ostE-osis                [see] syn-ost-osis

            syn-ostE-otic                [see] syn-ost-otic

            syn-ost-otic                  pertaining to syn-ost-osis

            syn-ost-osis                  "the fusing of bones"

Thus this definition--the dictionary one--seems to be at least "contaminated" by the concept of "ossification," if not outright derived somehow or other from

            x-ost-osis                     the ossification of x,

rather than from our hypothetical *syn-oste-um!  To put this differently, syn-ost-osis (with its dictionary definition) perhaps represents a cluster of ideas looking for a P-oste-um to hold it together--to realize it--perhaps a word like

            *syn-oste-ost-osis      the ossification of

                                                "a bones-together thing"

We might be reminded here that our speculations about the parallel case of ect-ost-osis at the beginning of this Post led us to a hypothetical

            *ect-oste-ost-osis      the ossification of

                                                something outside a bone

Perhaps the real truth is that there does exist yet another "template" or word pattern, namely

            *P-oste-ost-osis         the ossification of

                                                P-oste-um

                                                            = something located in the relation to a bone

                                                            specified by P-

--a "template" which is consistently misunderstood by its users, resulting in the anomalous forms P-ost-osis.

            But it would be very difficult to be certain about this; sadly, more and more such ill-formed words are appearing in the vocabulary, of the kind that we were calling "invalid" back in the "Fighting Words" Post.

            This particular source of confusion is perhaps worsened by what may be an overall  tendency to simplify things, manifested here by a trend towards replacing -ostE- by the shorter -ost-.  If so, like many simplifications, this one rests upon an error which is bound to result in needless confusions.

            Examination of our largest set of attested words of the form P-oste-Z (where -Z stands for any ending at all, and where none of the words show "contamination" by the concept of "ossification") shows that -oste- is still the "preferred form" (the one to which any alternate is cross-referenced), in all but two words.  Here are all of the main-entry words in questions, with (as usual) the translations we would expect our students to present:

            peri-oste-al                 surrounding a bone

                                                <students might also have--equally plausibly--generated

                                                pertaining to

                                                something surrounding a bone>

            peri-oste-oma             a tumor involving

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-oste-edema         the swelling of

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-osteo-medull-itis the inflammation of the marrow and

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-osteo-myel-itis    the inflammation of the marrow and

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-osteo-phyte         a growth on

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-oste-otomy          the cutting of

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-oste-otome          an instrument for cutting

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-oste-ous               pertaining to

                                                something surrounding a bone

                                                <students might also have--equally plausibly--generated

                                                surrounding a bone>

In four of these cases, an alleged synonym in peri-ost- is cross-referenced to the -ostE- form; but the two words which are cross-referenced the other way are the following (with the defined main entries included, for completeness):

            peri-ostE-itis                [see] peri-ost-itis

            peri-ostE-osis              [see] peri-ost-osis

            peri-ost-itis                  the inflammation of

                                                something surrounding a bone

            peri-ost-osis                an abnormal condition involving

                                                something surrounding a bone

            The implication will be clear to anyone who has spent too much time inside a medical dictionary: the two most frequently occurring diagnoses in all of medicine (at least as revealed by the dictionary) are those named X-osis and X-itis.  The fact that in our group, it is the "frequent flyer" words peri-ost-ITIS and peri-ost-OSIS that are edging out the older, "more correct" forms in -ostE- seems to confirm that the erroneous--and therefore alarming--trend I speculated about above is for real.

            On that note, two more dictionary entries associated with the word periosteum are worth pointing out, with commentary:

            peri-ost-oste-itis          [see] osteo-peri-ost-itis

            osteo-peri-ost-itis        <defined in the dictionary as if the word were

                                                *peri-ostE-ostE-itis>

            *peri-ostE-ostE-itis      the inflammation of a bone and

                                                something surrounding a bone

The second entry bears the additional note "also called periosteitis."  Now this is all a bit confusing.  Were the coiners shooting for something analogous to a version of the hypothetical template postulated above, namely a *peri-OSTE-ost-itis modelled upon our *P-oste-ost-osis?  If so, they missed pretty badly, not only putting the word-parts in not just one but two different wrong orders, but also getting the translation completely wrong!--

            *peri-oste-ost-itis        the inflammation of something involving

                                                the ossification of

                                                something surrounding a bone

Finally, meditate upon the future as perhaps indicated by this--

            peri-ost                        [see] peri-oste-um

                                                                        - o -

13. ONE-ROOM-SCHOOLHOUSE LATIN SUMMER-CAMP

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

          Once upon a time an eminent scholar of Renaissance Latin, reinvented as Dean of Humanities, horrified a rump of beleagured Classicists by suggesting that we open up, for example, our fourth-year Virgil Class to students with no Latin.  That way, she explained (and by now we knew she wasn't joking), in addition to the one or two Latinists we'd normally get we'd draw maybe twenty or more literature and history students, and the Dean's Office would be able to look more kindly down upon us.

            I am embarrassed now that our closed-mindedness shut us off from the possibilities she was raising.  The work involved would of course be immense (starting with thinking our way outside of the obvious boxes); but if we could imagine our way into a course wherein two completely disparate student groups could manage to achieve (perhaps different) course credit out of the work they and we did in one and the same run of classroom hours, we would truly be onto a new thing.  But how to even begin?

            Once upon a completely different time my mother and father attended high school in Veteran, Alberta; the time this was upon was the late 1930's, and the teacher, a Mr. Garvey, taught all subjects to (and here is the point) all grades of students at once.  For this was the famous "one-room-schoolhouse" of western Canadian myth (the road to and from which was uphill both ways, especially in winter, when it was at least five miles longer than in summer).  My parents were not notably disadvantaged by this experience; in fact they emerged better able to read, write and calculate than most first-year university students nowadays--in particular, they emerged very well-read, and (my father especially) possessing a large repetoire of English poetry, declaimable at will.

            Could some version of a "one-room-shoolhouse" work for Latin teaching?  What if we began by  narrowing the scope, and restricted the schoolroom to Latinists (so much for the Renaissance fantasy), while opening it to Latinists at all different levels?

            Once--and this is my own experience (so that it seems to me more "down in" than "up" and "on" any particular time)--I taught for three summers in a row what I called Intensive First-year Latin, and what my best cohort (a bunch of English Literature students) called Latin Summer Camp.  That particular offering became locally famous for the season because many of the students spent whole days together outside the classroom (and here is the point of this particular anecdote) working on the material, in small groups of four or five, and becoming objects of some wonderment on campus.

            This was all an outgrowth of what we did in the classroom, where they spent nearly all their time working in groups, all at more or less the same rate, on the readings and exercises furnished by our textbook.  My time was divided among the groups, in a rotation: I sat in with one group for one exercise set or one section of continuous reading, doing the usual questioning, critiquing and mini-lecturing as they worked their way through the sentences (one at a time, also in rotation); then I moved to the next group, interrupted them, and made that lot go back and do the same set or section with me as I had just done with the first group.  When I had thus worked my way around the room to the first group again, I made them go back to where I had left them at the end of our first session, and we then did the following set or section together.  In this way, during the two hours of class-time I got to work through all of the material with each group, each group had to work through all the material twice, and each student got not only lots of "stage time" but also lots and lots of feedback, both from me and from her peers.

            There were a few simple rules.  No student could do with me the very sentence she had previously done in the unattended group.  All students were expected to spend at least two hours of "homework" time outside class for every hour in class (hence the random groups of Latinists decorating the landscape), and each student was expected to come to each class having already worked through the grammar and exercises behind the material we planned to get through during class.

            The first rule encouraged a nearly unbelievable degree of concentration upon those group members not "performing" at any given moment, since there was no way of predicting who would be called upon to deal with any given sentence "in front of the prof," as well as a great deal of cooperation between members, so that they actually worked through most of the material "together" rather than separately.  This cooperation extended into their time with me, so that they helped each other even in my presence; and ultimately it led most of them into doing their homework together, often outside in public (where among other things they did a great job--by their highly visible enthusiasm--of promoting the study of Latin!).

            With practice, these processes quickly came to work very efficiently.  A surprise to me was how incessantly each group hummed along; I would occasionally leave the room, just to see if anyone noticed (no one ever did)!  My own work with them involved less repetition than one might expect given the situation, further indicating to me how independent the groups were of one another.  In effect, each was a separate unit, with different strengths and weaknesses, ultimately even working through the required material at slightly different rates, so that towards the end of term I had to adjust my "rotations" (not often, and not by much) to ensure that we all finished more or less together.

            A surprising revelation to all of us in this context was that, as the groups "matured"--as they became more confident and competent, in particular as they became better at mutual self-scrutiny within the group--we found that it didn't actually matter much whether I was there for all of the sentences in the set of exercises or sections of reading we were working through; in another sense altogether, I could as it were "leave the room!"  Or--and here is the point--I was free to work more with whichever group might most need extra help at any given time.

            Taken together, all these aspects of the experience showed me how a "one-room-schoolhouse" might work for a roomful of Latinists actually operating at substantially different levels of learning.  In its simplest version, I envision a minimum of three groups.  Although an ideal group size is between four and six, so long as there are enough students at any given level--say four beginners at a minimum, at least three in second year, and two or more at third-year and up, the different groups would be able to function in the same classroom in pretty much the same way as did the summer students I've been describing.

            There would be two major differences.  First, since they would all be working through different materials, the teacher would have three separate preparations.  Is there a Latinist among us (the professoriate) who could claim this to be onerous, with a straight face?  I hope not!  More seriously, my own experience suggests this wouldn't be a problem at all; occasionally my groups would get "out of synch" for various reasons, but once they realized the onus was on them to show me both where they were and where we needed to go back to every time I materialized in their unit, all was well.  As they progressed they also got very good answering my initial utterance every time I showed up, namely, "any questions?"--with specific requests: "we were wondering...."

            The second major difference grows out of the very fact that markedly different levels of knowledge would be featured in our putative "one-room-schoolhouse," allowing us to also experiment with adaptations of another excellent feature of that old system, namely, using "big kids to help teach the little kids."  A "rule" I laid onto myself, and didn't tell the students about, was that in the first week or so I worked hard to "tweak" the groups, trying to ensure that each contained a roughly equivalent mix of strong and weak students.  This led to efficiencies within each group, such that the stronger students, by helping the weaker ones, actually learned much more than if their contact had been limited to occasional in-class exchanges with me.

            Expect further details in later posts, about what this course might look like in the real world, and suggestions about how it might be integrated with an existing Latin program, and about some of the arguments that would need to be made to both Deans and Unions.

            For now, the relevant point is that we could solve at least three "Latin problems" this way: students could begin their studies as early as the beginning of May (as they currently can at only a few institutions), and--much more importantly--they could study for-credit year-round, accomplishing two years worth of traditional Latin work during one calendar year of elapsed time.  Thus someone starting in May could have credit for two full years of Latin by the end of April, while a September starter could be entering third year the following September.

            These considerations would be especially beneficial for anyone whose Latin epiphany ("that's what I need to learn!") didn't arrive until the third or even fourth year of undergrad life, as well as to all those students who currently get discouraged at the end of August by the dismal shape of their own fading memories of the Latin they last looked at during the April final (many of whom therefore "cut their losses" and don't continue).

            Meantime the Dean would be happy because the overall Latin retention rate would be better, because Introductory Summer Latin (if previously taught at all) would have more students than before, and because--best of all--the summer teaching of second- and upper-year Latin to a few tiny coteries of students wouldn't cost her anything extra!

                                                                        - o -

Variously Heavy Women:Latin Phrases (and Words) Used to Describe Pregnant Women

Note that the following terms are also presented and discussed in Chapter 19 of Stiles & Russell, Anatomy of Medical Terminology: Advanced Concepts (Radix Antiqua, 2018).

Two formulaic phrases (often abbreviated to single words) are regularly used. Many of the linguistic considerations involved are discussed in terms of one of these in this blogpost; the second (and two related formulations) will be discussed in the next post.

Note that in the algebraic formulae below, "x-" stands for either a number or a numerical adjective (for a full list, see my Advanced Medical Terminology, Chapter 19; a version of this list will be included for reference at the end of the next post).

• (femina) x-i-gravid-a = a woman pregnant for the xth time

In the real world, this basic Latin phrase will almost never be fully written out; rather, you will see it in one of two abbreviated forms, as the following examples show:

• septigravida (= septi-gravid-a) or gravida VII = a woman pregnant for the seventh time
• octigravida (= octi-gravid-a) or gravida VIII = a woman pregnant for the eighth time

Linguistically, Latin gravid-a is the feminine form of an adjective meaning "heavy," required by the Rules or Principles of Agreement (see Anatomy of Medical Terminology chapter 6 and passim) because the Latin noun femin-a is (of course) a noun of the feminine gender. This adjective is the root of many English derivatives like grave ("heavy" or "serious"), grav-ity ("heavy-ness"), and of course, grav-id ("heavy;" a euphemism for "pregnant," as in "she is heavy with child").

Although the standard form of the numerical abbreviation has always featured the Roman numeral in second position, it is likely that contemporary usage (not yet attested in Dorland's) will sometimes show the number in first position as an alternative designation (the standard examples of the parallel phrase discussed in the following post already feature this reversal); in addition, Arabic numerals are beginning to replace the traditional Roman ones in many "sets" of phrases in Medical Terminology. Hypothetical examples (marked with an asterisk) of our phrase follow:

• *VI gravida (= sexti-gravid-a) = *gravida 6, or *6 gravida = a woman pregnant for the sixth time

As a careful reader will have noted, the formulaic translation "x-th" sometimes needs to be adjusted to suit a particular numeric prefix (thus, for example, eighth, not *eight-th).

Finally, because many numeric and quantitative prefixes have alternate forms in common usage in other areas of Medical Terminology, it is likely that a few other synonymous words or phrases might occur. The following list of examples, both attested and plausible, is meant to be a fairly complete assemblage of the descriptive terms which might be found to designate a woman in her first pregnancy:

• primigravida (= "prime"-gravid-a) = gravida I a woman pregnant for the first time

      = *unigravida (= uni-gravid-a; L uni- = one)
      = *monogravida (= mono-gravid-a; G mono- one)
      = *I gravida = *1 gravida or *gravida = *G 1

NOTES re the forms not yet attested in Dorland's (some or all of which might turn up already on google searches....):

• *uni-gravida can be predicted from closely related uniparous ("bearing one offspring;" see AMT and the following blogpost)
• *mono-gravida (containing G mono- = one; widely used in Medical

Terminology and elsewhere in English, as in mono-gamy, etc.) reflects the fact the "rule" forbidding "bastard terms" (part Greek, part Latin) has long fallen into disuse (see other blogs, and the textbook Introductions)

• *I gravida, by reversing the order of standard gravida I, reflects a tendency (discussed in the textbooks and other blogs) to "rationalize" Latin word order by adapting it to the English standard of Adjective + Noun; this long ago resulted in the generation of a parallel standard form in the case of closely related x-i-para (discussed in the next post), which is abbreviated in either of two forms;
• thus both X para and para X (= deci-para) name "a woman who has borne 10 offspring."
• *gravida 1 (with *1 gravida) reflects the increasing disuse of Roman Numerals in English
• *G 1 reflects a very recent and rapidly accelerating tendency to use abbreviations instead of whole words (let alone phrases); this tendency is at least partly the result of a general loss of understanding of word-meanings on the part of medical people (see the advanced textbook, the forthcoming seminar course at USASK, and several forthcoming blog posts).

In all these matters, you may find the following midwifery textbooks useful:

• Physical Assessment of the Well Woman & Newborn
• Pharmacology Revealed
• Comprehensive Midwifery Vol. 1: Professional Roles
• Comprehensive Midwifery Vol. 2: Normal Pregnancy, Birth, Postpartum & Newborn Care
• Comprehensive Midwifery Vol. 3: Management of Complications

On questions of Medical Terminology, make sure to consult: Stiles Medical Terminology

12. P-OSTE-UM RECONSIDERED

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

            In Post 11 ("Wordhood Cubed?") I suggested among other things that, where P- stands for "any prepositional prefix," any word of the form P-oste-um would imply the existence of a large number of words of the form P-X-N (where X names a concrete object and -N denotes any nominative singular ending), with a predictable "standard" meaning:

                        P-X-N               =          something located in the relationship to X

                                                            specified by P.

The observation that neither P-oste-um nor P-X-N are particularly well-attested led us to consider the further postulates, first that

            any P-X-A (examples being many) presupposes a corresponding P-X-N;

and, second, that actually      

            any word of the form P-X-Z (where -Z stands for any ending at all), also

            presupposes a corresponding P-X-N.

Note that I didn't put this last postulate into so many words, but that this formulation is the logical result of our look at words of the form P-X-itis, where

                        P-X-ITIS            =        the inflammation of

                                                            something located in the relationshp to X

                                                            specified by P

                                                =          the inflammation of

                                                            P-X-N.

            The argument from P-X-A was almost parallel, but a little more convoluted.  Now I can admit that the convolution arose from putting the more difficult case first: as students of TheAnatomy of Medical Terminology know (from Chapter 13),  there is always a "Plan B" translation for any word of this shape:

                        P-X-A               =          pertaining to

                                                            something located in the relationship to X

                                                            specified by P

                                                =          pertaining to P-X-N!

            So far so good, or so I hope.  But I've been promising another look at the considerations which started this line of thought, and the example from which we began; perhaps I can put it this way:

            If a large number of words exists of the general form P-X-N, then a relatively large number of words of the specific form P-OSTE-UM (relative to the the number of specific forms of P) should also exist.  But, as we saw, only two are actually directly attested, out of more than twenty that "should" exist given that there are at least twenty productive prepositional prefixes running around out there in the real world.

            By now the plan of attack I have in mind is probably obvious; the key phrase in the preceding sentence is "directly attested," with emphasis on "directly."  What we were working with in the "Wordhood Cubed" post--the evidence arising from analogous words like P-X-A and P-X-ITIS--could be called a process of "indirect attesting" to the reality of the target words P-X-N.

            And such is the evidence that as it were "surrounds" the putative nouns of the form P-OSTE-UM.  As we have seen, end-oste-um (Post 2) is well-attested; peri-oste-um is also found "in the dictionary."  They are listed below; in aid of some of the "missing" others, so are the following words, all of the form P-OSTE-Z (where -Z denotes any ending at all; the asterisk "*" denotes that a word is not directly attested):

            WORD                         OUR TRANSLATION

            PERI-oste-um              the part SURROUNDING a bone

            END-oste-um               the part INSIDE a bone

            ECT-oste-al                  pertaining to

                                                something OUTSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *ECT-oste-um

            INTER-osse-ous           pertaining to

                                                something BETWEEN bones

                                                     = the *INTER-osse-um

                                                     = the *INTER-osTe-um

                                                (see below, on synonyms, for the skipped step)

            SYN-oste-otomy          the cutting of

                                                "bones-TOGETHER" (translated as "a joint")

                                                     = a *SYN-oste-um

                                                (by admittedly tortured logic!)

The following synonyms are also attested:

            INTRA-oste-al              <cross-referenced to INTRA-osse-ous>

            INTRA-osse-ous           pertaining to

                                                something INSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *INTRA-osse-um

                                                     = the *INTRA-osTe-um

                                                     = the END-oste-um (above; attested)

            ENT-ost-osis                <cross-referenced to EN-ost-osis>

            EN-ost-osis                  = *END-ostE-osis

                                                (see Post 2 for the gory details!)

            *END-oste-osis            an abnormal condition involving

                                                something INSIDE a bone

                                                     = END-oste-um (above; attested)

                                                     = *EN-oste-um

                                                     = *ENT-oste-um

            Analogously, the following form presupposes a synonym for *ECT-oste-um:

            EX-ost-osis                   an abnormal condition involving

                                                something OUTSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *EX-ostE-um

                                                     = the *ECT-oste-um.

            Synonymity is itself another "multiplier" in terms of "real but unattested words" (see a forthcoming Post): as cross-listings in the dictionaries show, pretty much any synonymous combining form can be substituted for another (see also The Anatomy of Medical Terminology, passim).  In the examples above, the combining forms oste- and osse- are synonymous; therefore a "fully-expanded count" of the words we are considering here would also include those generated by a rule like

            for every P-OSTE-UM attested directly or indirectly, there is a synonym

            P-OSSE-UM; and vice versa.

            Similarly, just as end-, en-, ent- and intra- are synonymous (as we saw above), so too are prefixes denoting the opposite locational relationship, "outside," namely, extra-, ex-, and ect-.  Therefore *EXTRA-oste-um and, of course, *EXTRA-osse-um, have to join the club (along with *ECT-oste-um and *EX-oste-um, indirectly attested above).

            Nor do these "indirect attestations" exhaust the possibilities we have opened up here.  Just because no current word seems to exist suggesting that the concepts expressed by the phrases listed below denote useful objects, does that mean that one or more of the candidate words listed beside them may not someday be just as real as periosteum and the rest?

            CONCEPT/DEFINITION                       CANDIDATE WORD(S)

            something UPON a bone                    *EPI-oste-um

            something BELOW a bone                  *SUB-oste-um, *INFRA-oste-um

            something BESIDE a bone                   *PARA-oste-um

            something BEFORE a bone                 *PRE-oste-um

            There is more to say about all this.  For now, notice how we have been able to use the concepts applied to the derivation of the "meta-rule" about P-X-N in the Post "Wordhood Cubed" to considerably expand the count of arguably real words symbolized by the much more specific template P-oste-um.

                                                                        - o -
More on Stiles Medical Terminology here.