(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; copyright 1993; ISBN 978-1-988941-240; to be revised by Stiles and Russell 2017)
This means all four
of you, assuming any subset of you is still here!
I've
heard tell a great thing about blogland is, you can have a "sidebar"
? in/on which you can organize the various posts in various ways, and even a
statement (or link thereto) of at what and for whom the blog is intended. I haven't been able to find this yet; but
with faith in it's reality (!), here's a draft.
At the most bloody-minded level, the purpose of the blog
is to show anyone studying this material with anyone other than Stephen or me
that we can offer them something considerably better than what they've
currently got. My fond hope is that
web-surfing students looking for help with their homework will find it and then
nag their teachers into checking us out; and to that end many of the posts will
(eventually) be designed to be actually helpful in a direct way to those
students, regardless of the book and methods they are using.
But the real audience, at this level, is the teachers, primarily
those specifically teaching Medical Terminology but also those grappling more
generally with Latglish (whether broadly, in so-called "Roots"
courses, or more narrowly in courses on Legal or Scientific Terminology); I am
hoping that these readers will find most of the posts interesting and useful in
one way or another. Classicists
especially, but also Deans of Humanities, are invited to be impressed.
At a slightly higher level of bloody-mindedness, the
purpose of the blog is to assert forcefully that the teaching of Medical
Terminology is best done by classicists and other historical linguists (the
people who used to be called Philologists), rather than by medical people,
because as life-long students of words we see and can understand and explain
more things about them--more useful things--than users of those words typically
can, even (or especially) those word-users whose life-long expertise is the
body parts, ailments and cures which the words themselves name. (There will be a post or two on this subject,
sooner rather than later!)
In these terms, students and teachers involved in courses
in which non-philologists present human anatomy along with lists of the
word-parts (and examples of whole words) used in the field will probably find
this blog less than helpful; these courses (and the textbooks used in them),
though invoking "medical terminology," are actually teaching
something a bit different. (This claim
will also generate a post; it will be related to the ones about the difference
between learning what a word describes in the world, on the one hand, and what
that word tells you about itself, on the other; I will be asserting that the
latter is quite a bit closer to solving the vexed question of what a word
"means!")
In other words, a major purpose of this blog is to claim
turf.
Finally, I still have faith that if I can write the damn
posts carefully enough then I can say some things which will be interesting to
the famous (but surely not mythical?) "educated general reader" who
reckons language among the things worth knowing something about. If it were a book I'd want it to be one of
those books people like me find at places like Prince's Bookstore here in
Hamilton--a specialist's carefully edited account of a specialized subject,
carefully designed for the educated non-specialist.
And besides all
that, I need a home for the unpublished article Bill Sargeant (a
paleontologist) and I wrote about the sad state of biological nomenclature, and
for the dinosaur names more generally, and the scripts of all the videos, and
the draft introduction and sample letter ("-P-", I think) of the Etymological
Dictionary of Medical Terminology,
and....
And,
so far, this is just the one sock-puppet!
-
o -
No comments:
Post a Comment