Weak response to Petite présentation

gasp wrote:I see you have the following line in your signature: "The singular of nares is naris." Therefore, if I understand correctly when I'm speaking about how a nasal pillow has affected only one, I would say, "my naris is killing me."

Yes, that's right, or you could simply say "nostril" as well.

It's just my subtle way of griping about an occupational hazard: I do medical transcription, and my job is to use medical language correctly as much as possible despite all of the medical personnel who insist on mangling it. Medical vocabulary is mostly derived from Latin and Greek, and some of their rules don't come naturally when we're speaking in English. Probably 90% of the dictators I've transcribed say "nare" instead of "naris".

Voilà.

Nifty, you learn something new every day! I had been wondering what your sig was about.

So when doing transcription, do you replace what they say with the correct word?

zzzzzz!! wrote:

gasp wrote:I see you have the following line in your signature: "The singular of nares is naris." Therefore, if I understand correctly when I'm speaking about how a nasal pillow has affected only one, I would say, "my naris is killing me."

Yes, that's right, or you could simply say "nostril" as well.

It's just my subtle way of griping about an occupational hazard: I do medical transcription, and my job is to use medical language correctly as much as possible despite all of the medical personnel who insist on mangling it. Medical vocabulary is mostly derived from Latin and Greek, and some of their rules don't come naturally when we're speaking in English. Probably 90% of the dictators I've transcribed say "nare" instead of "naris".

Voilà.

So when doing transcription, do you replace what they say with the correct word?

It depends on who you're working for. It used to be more common to edit if you were 100% certain what it was supposed to be (the dictators get tired and distracted and you can't imagine how many totally nonsensical or blatantly wrong things they say), but as the medical record is a legal record, now it's becoming more common to transcribe verbatim or, in the case of a problem or instance where the dictator is obviously wrong, to leave a blank which he or she is supposed to fill in before he/she signs the record.

Could you imagine medical terminology changing according to the medical community's usage as happens in the case of everyday language changing as society dictates? That would make your job an even greater challenge!

But it does! Like any other language, medical language evolves as well. New procedures, new drugs, new technology, new "doctorisms" that become accepted as words... we have dictionaries and word reference books and such which are updated periodically by their publishers. That said, there's also a lot of slang and made-up words which are commonly used though technically unacceptable. Going back to "nare", for example, I've worked for people who required it to be typed as dictated and for others who asked that it be changed to naris, just to be correct.

I believe apnea has a Greek origin meaning "a" (absence of) and "pnea" (to breathe), or something close to this.

There you see how medical language works in general, made up of combinations of word roots and prefixes and suffixes. "Apnea" you already know; change the prefix to hypo and you have hypopnea; tachy (fast) gives us tachypnea; dys- (bad) gives us dyspnea, or shortness of breath/perceived difficulty breathing.

Okay, I'll shut up now. Thanks for asking.

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CPAPopedia Keywords Contained In This Post (Click For Definition): Hypopnea

zzzzzz!! wrote:. . . new "doctorisms" that become accepted as words...

This is what I was referring to. Good to know and thanks!