Re: [HAPS-L] Where do words come from? Why do they last? Why do they disappear?

["David Evans" <devans@xxxxxxx>]

Alan has the normally accepted English-language idea of usage when he says: "The answer to these questions is ?usage?. People devise words and retain them in language because of their utility. The proper test then is utility, not purity."

For example: how many know that typewriter once meant the person who did the typing? Now even the term stenographer has nearly disappeared. When will our culture forget what the machine itself once was?

>>> amagid@xxxxxxxxx 11/18/2006 11:08 AM >>>

The answer to these questions is ?usage?. People devise words and retain them in language because of their utility. The proper test then is utility, not purity.

Efforts by self-constituted authority to willfully supplant words in wide use by ?preferred? terms rarely succeed. Witness the fate of Bowdler?s efforts to ?improve? classical literature, for example.

An eponym may seem obscure to those first encountering it but with usage it becomes familiar and even necessary.

A good example for the present discussion is the ?sphincter of Oddi?. Should we prefer it in our teaching to ?hepatopancreatic sphincter?? Yes, of course, because words are tools, and we shouldn?t send our students into the world equipped with useless tools. A quick search of Google found 155,000 references to ?sphincter of Oddi? but only 534 to ?hepatopancreatic sphincter?.

Why stuff our students? heads full of marginally useful terms (words are NOT A&P information), when there is such a keen need to reserve that limited neural real estate for truly important information such as the notion that passage between the digestive organs is controlled and regulated by ?circular ? or spiral- bands of muscle in the walls of hollow viscera?.

For some purposes, for example, publishing original research in the specialized scientific literature, compulsory adherence to a prescribed Nomina can be justified. But in the context of undergraduate health education it is scarcely worth the effort.

-Alan 

>From - Mon Jan 1 00:00:00 1965
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