8. DESPERATE DISORDERS

(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)

DESPERATE DISORDERS
(Or, Desperate Remedies for Desperate Diseases?)

                For a little comic relief, here are some actual student errors made on exams, most of which I collected in my early days of being involved in the teaching of Medical Terminology and trying to figure out how students might be taught just a little bit better.  On a serious note, error analysis being one of the best ways of teaching this material, I am happy to report that since writing the The Anatomyof Medical Terminology I haven't been able to add items to this list as often as part of me would still like to!

                The errors are all real; in some cases I've edited for clarity.

                The ones presented here (about a third of the collection) fall into one major category, which could be described as "Errors of Conception or Usage."  They seem to be further dividable, into the following subcategories:

                Errors involving an English word used in a wrong sense

                Erroneous choice of the wrong English word, two meanings being possible

                Numerical misconception

                Misperception of relationships between word-parts

                                reversal of order

                                other errors of "modification"

The words below are presented in order of these subcategories.  As a "homework assignment," see if the boundaries of these groupings are as obvious to you as they once seemed to me.  Enjoy!

retro-graphy                       the recording of the behind

eu-toc-ia                            an abnormal condition of goodness in children

necro-sperm-ia                  an abnormal condition involving deadly sperm

necr-ectomy                      excision causing death

chromo-rhin-orrhea            the flowing of colors from the nose

meso-nas-al                       pertaining to a medium nose

dent-iparous                      pertaining to the (proper) bearing of one's teeth

cerat-itis                            horny inflammation

                         (or)          inflammation with horn-shaped lumps

dextro-card-ia                   a condition involving a right-handed heart

peri-xen-itis                       inflammation when around a stranger

tricho-card-ia                    a condition characterized by a hair-like heart

                         (or)          an abnormal condition involving hearty hair

cystido-trachel-otomy       the cutting of the neck and bladder

post-hepat-itic                  behind (= causing) the inflammation of the liver

sarc-omphalo-cele            the protrusion of a fleshy navel

nephel-opia                      a visual fixation on clouds

hippo-uria                        the abnormal presence of horses in the urine

hypo-orchid-ia                 an abnormal condition of being below the testicles

anthropo-phagy               the swallowing of humans

orth-uria                          the abnormal presence of straight things in the urine

hyper-calci-uria               the abnormal presence of calcium in something above urine

karyo-phage                   one who eats the nuclei of cells

brachy-uran-ic                pertaining to a short sky

sinistro-ocular                 pertaining to the left eyes

null-ipara                        a mother who has borne no children

oligo-phren-ia                 a condition involving few diaphragms

chrono-gnosis                 an abnormal condition involving chronological knowledge

erythro-phag-ia               a condition of turning red while eating

homo-gam-ous                pertaining to the same marriage

galact-emia                      the abnormal presence of milk in the blood

irid-emia                          the abnormal presence of iris fragments in the blood

leuko-cyt-uria                  the abnormal presence of urine in white blood cells

tricho-gloss-ia                  an abnormal condition of the tongue in the hair

tricho-myc-osis                an abnormal condition involving hairy fungi

gyneco-mania                   female insanity

trichocardia                      an abnormal condition of the hair, involving the heart

necr-ectomy                    death by excision

antro-neuro-lysis              the disintegration of the cavities of the nerves

heter-esthesia                   the perception of oneself as different

pyo-pneumo-cholecyst-itis        

                                        the inflammation of gall bladder, lungs and pus

anti-nephr-it-ic                 pertaining to the inflammation of the part up against the kidneys

                         (or)         pertaining to an inflammation operating against the kidney

litho-phone                      a stone instrument for hearing

acro-cephal--ia               an abnormal condition of the extremities being in the head

pseudochrom-esthest-ic

                                      pertaining to the perception that one has been falsely colored

pseudo-encephalo-malacia
                                     the softening of a false brain

myxo-en-chondr-oma   a tumor involving the cartilage inside the mucous membranes

quint-ipara                    five things beside one another

(More available on demand!)

                                                                         - o -

                                                                                - o -

7. TO MY LOYAL READERS....A DRAFT SIDEBAR

(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 -

6. SPECIES MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY; GENUS LATGLISH

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2017; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

           

            So why "Latglish?"  Partly out of frustration.  It is difficult to find useful terminology when discussing the fact that contemporary English vocabulary is riddled with polysyllabic words which are not native to our branch of the Germanic languages and which are made up of word-parts (morphemes) some (but not necessarily all) of which were once word-parts in Latin (although some of those began life in ancient Greek, and others were snatched into English from languages like French which developed out of Classical Latin).

            To put this more technically, English is a Germanic language, sharing near ancestry with German, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish (among others); it is also an Indo-European language, sharing remote ancestry with (among many others) both Latin and Greek, and it is therefore even more distantly connected to the Latin-derived Romance languages (most importantly for our purposes, French, Spanish and Italian).  But despite this, an actual word count reveals that once you get past the most commonly used 3 or 4 thousand words in English, about 60% of the remaining 100 thousand or so words (estimates of the total vary) contain at least one (usually more than one) morpheme (or "meaningful word-part") which was at one time or another a Latin (or Greco-Latin) word-part. What to call these words?  Latin?  But they are not.  Latinate?  Better, but a bit vague.

            Rather than calling them something like, "English words made up of one or more parts which have been borrowed from Latin or Romance (some of which may have been earlier borrowed from Greek), and to which non-Latin (mostly Germanic) word-parts and patterns of combination either have been or may be applied," let's just say "Latglish" (a blend of one Latinate--not Latin!--word, and one English one)--it's shorter.  

            For illustrations of some of the problems we are trying to deal with here, consider the following statements:

                        I think therefore I live.

                        cogito ergo vivo.

The first is "English" not only in the sense that all the words in it are native to our language but also because all the morphemes in it (including "there" and "fore") are native; the second sentence is called "Latin" for the same reasons.  But "ergo" is also an English word, a rare type, borrowed whole without even phonetic modification; it could therefore be called "a Latin word borrowed into English."

            English "cogit-at-e" and "cogit-at-ion" on the other hand clearly contain Latinate parts (the morphemes cogit-, -at- and -ion-; the fact that cogit- itself breaks into co-, an allomorph of the Latin prefix cum-, -g-, an allomorph of the verb ag-ere, and -it-, an allomorph of -at- doesn't even have to slow us down).   So "cogit-at-ion" could be called "Latinate," rather than "Latin," given that the word in that form never existed in Latin.  But the -e of "cogit-at-e" had no place in Latin at all--should we then call this word "Latinate-oid?"

            Similarly, even though "viv-id", "re-viv-e" and "con-viv-ial-ity" contain a Latinate morpheme (meaning "live"), they all end in non-Latin ways, while "viv-if-ic-at-ion," "viv-i-sect-ion" and "sur-viv-al-ist" would puzzle Caesar and Cicero even though most of the parts are Latinate (-ist however comes from Greek), because the parts involved were never used in those particular combinations in Latin.  "Vit-amin," "vict-ual-s" (with its derivative "vitt-el-s") "re-vit-al-iz-at-ion-al-ism," and "vit-al-ity," although they each contain versions of -vit- (itself an allomorph of -viv-), provoke similar difficulties.

            To oversimplify in the interests of driving some of these points home, one of the ironies is that one of the few ways you cannot write Latglish "cogitation" in Latin is "cogitation"--the permissible Latin forms, which depend upon the word's context, are "cogitatio, cogitationis, cogitationi, cogitationem, cogitatione," and in the plural "cogitationes, cogitationum" and "cogitationibus."  "Vivid" is even worse, appearing in Latin as "vividus, vivida, vividum, vivide, vivido, vividi, vividae, vividam, vividorum, vividarum, vividis, vividos and vividas" but not ever as plain ordinary "vivid."

            Nor would the sounds we make when saying Latglish out loud be familiar to the gentlemen who called each other--to spell their names quasi-phonetically--Kikero and Kaesar (the Germans got the pronunciation of Kaiser right when they borrowed Caesar's name as a title).  To take only the easier of the two sets of examples above, all of the words we pronounce with the "v" sound were, for the Romans, "w" sounds: Iulius Kaesar did not say "veni, vidi, vici"--although that is what he wrote; what he said was something like "wanee, weedee, weekee."  The Latglish words "vivid" and "convivival" are thus very different from the Latin word parts pronounced "wiwid-" and "conwiwial-."

            To illustrate just one further complication let's look at some Latglish words derived from Latinate versions of the classical morpheme meaning "tooth."  Along with Latinate-ish "dent-ist-ry" (one Latin, one Greek, and one Germanic morpheme), we have in English "peri-odont-ic-s" in which the second of two Greek morphemes is cognate with Latinate -dent- (and with English tooth!), while -ic- occurs in both Greek and Latin, and -s is the regular English plural, but used here either as a translation or an analogue of Latin and Greek plural morphemes; and in the name of the flower or weed called "tooth-of-lion," dan- comes from a French version of Latin dent-.  Speaking of metaphor (which we haven't even begun to, yet), you can probably see by now why the first word of this paragraph is said to be "in-dent-ed!"

                                                                        - o -