Ditzels, Schmutz, and Grumus: The Language of Radiology

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Preface:

One of the things I find distasteful about writing for print media is the process of submitting my work. Once a piece is submitted, there are four possible outcomes. Frequently, an almost instanteous rejection occurs, raising doubt as to whether anyone actually read the piece. Second (rarely), the piece may be accepted after a reasonable period of evaluation. Third, the piece may be rejected after a reasonable period of evaluation. Finally, the piece may languish in limbo for a prolonged period of time without an editorial decision either way. The following falls into that category. I submitted it in March of 2008, over a year ago, to a periodical which states that a decision can be expected in four to six weeks! Despite additional queries to the editor, the article remains in queue, presumably unread. I present it here in the hopes that at least a couple of people may take the time to read it.

Gentle readers, this article contains 3 footnotes. It would please me greatly if you would click on the superscript numerals which link to the notes at the bottom of the article. At the end of each note is an upward-pointing arrow which will bring you back to the point in the article from whence you left. You can't imagine how long it took me to figure out how to do that in html code.

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen with Radiograph of His Wife's Hand

In 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (or Röntgen, for you Teutonic purists¹) discovered a type of radiation, which he called the X-ray, that could pass through solid objects. Shortly after his discovery, Roentgen used the mysterious ray to produce a picture (radiograph) of the bones of his wife's hand, which he could show around at scientific symposia, and possibly at cocktail parties. But might not someone outside Herr Professor Roentgen's circle of friends and acquaintances want to know what Frau Roentgen's phalanges looked like? Yes! And thus arose the need for someone who could look at the radiograph and dictate what we now know as a radiology report: “The bones are normal. There are no fractures. Mrs. Roentgen was unable to remove her ring due to consuming too much marzipan since her wedding.” And so forth. OK, it wasn't really as simple as all that, but eventually a group of physicians made it their business to produce and interpret radiographic images, or, as a patient once so delicately described it to me, to “look at people's guts all day.” In the early days, the specialty of diagnostic radiology depended solely on X-rays to produce medical images. Today, in addition to X-rays, images may be produced by sound waves (sonograms), radio waves in a strong magnetic field (magnetic resonance, or MR, scans), or minute amounts of radioactive material injected into the patient (nuclear medicine, known to some of its detractors by the anagrammic unclear medicine). In recent decades, medical imaging has been improved by rotating the X-ray tube around the patient, resulting in computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans. Even more recently, a new type of nuclear medicine scan, positron emission tomography, has become widely used, and nowadays is combined with the CAT scan to provide more precise diagnostic information. Thankfully, the more succinct “CT” replaces “CAT” in the name of the hybrid scan. Otherwise, we would be saddled with the PET/CAT scan instead of the PET/CT, and would have to suffer endless jokes about giving the family feline the once-over.

We enjoy the advantages of these new technologies today, but the early history of radiology was all about the X-ray, also called the Roentgen ray, in honor of the discoverer. To this day, one of the major professional associations for diagnostic radiology is The American Roentgen Ray Society, and their publication is The American Journal of Roentgenology, more commonly known as the AJR, or the Yellow Journal, not because of scandal-mongering editorial policies, but because of the color of the cover.

Like some early photographs, radiographs in the early twentieth century were recorded on glass plates coated with an emulsion. During World War I, if a medical officer wanted to locate a bullet in a doughboy's belly, he might have ordered a radiograph of the abdomen. The patient lay down under the X-ray tube with the emulsion-coated glass plate behind him. Today, even though radiographs are likely to be stored on a hard drive in digital format, the phrase "flat plate of the abdomen" refuses to die, and occasionally shows up in physicians' orders. Radiographs did not evolve directly from glass plates to digital images. A long intermediate step occurred when radiographs were produced on flexible films, like the ones seen hanging upside down in today's televised medical dramas. Before automated processors were invented, these films were dipped by hand into the developing solution and had to be hung up to dry. If the physician requesting the X-ray wanted to know the results immediately, the radiologist was asked to do a "wet read", or interpret the film before it had hung on the line long enough to dry. Even though it's been decades since films were hand processed, requests for wet reads still occur. More common terms today are STAT read or phone report.

Although not found in Dorland's Medical Dictionary, the term ditzel is universally recognized among radiologists as a very small nodule found in the lung. Such nodules are usually benign and related to a previous infection, but occasionally, a lung cancer can appear as a very small nodule if found early enough, presenting us with the daily dilemma of how to deal with these tiny lesions. The origins of this word are obscure. The only similar word I could find, ditz, emerged in the 1970s to describe a silly or inane person, and it seems unlikely that ditz morphed into ditzel. Even though ditzel does not appear in any dictionary, the word has been used in at least one article in the medical literature, specifically in the Yellow Journal.²

The suffix -oma (tumor, from the Greek -oma 'mass') is found frequently in medical parlance (lymphoma, sarcoma, hematoma, etc.). In radiology slang, the suffix is more loosely used to connote an abnormality. For instance, a lesion found on an examination performed for an unrelated reason may be referred to as an incidentaloma. Thus, a ditzel seen in the lung on a CT of the chest performed for suspected clots in the blood vessels could be called an incidentaloma. A ditzel that is hard to see might be called a vagoma. If it is so vague that only one radiologist sees it, it could be called an imaginoma by his snickering colleagues. If Dr. Hackenbush develops a reputation for seeing lots of imaginomas, these questionable abnormalities may then be called Hackenbushomas—a dubious honor at best for the good doctor. Disclaimer: I use the name Hackenbush for illustrative purposes only. I know of no radiologist, living or dead, named Hackenbush, and if there is or has been such a person, I am sure he or she is or was a fine diagnostician.³

While ditzel seems unique to radiology, some other unusual words, which can be found in dictionaries, are used in radiology reading rooms, if not in the medical literature. One of these is schmutz, defined as "dirt, filth, or rubbish," taken directly from Yiddish. In radiology jargon, the word implies something that doesn't belong, and is, in a sense, dirtying up the picture, as in “There is some schmutz around the pancreas. It must be inflamed,” or “There is a little schmutz in the right lung. Maybe the patient has pneumonia.”

I once attended a lecture about the coronary arteries, and the speaker talked about the grumus he identified in a vessel. This is a word I have heard occasionally bandied about in the reading room, used more or less interchangeably with schmutz, and pronounced grŭmŭs. The speaker, who used the same pronunciation, stated that grumus means a gelatinous blood clot. Being the skeptic, I resolved to research the word when I returned home from the conference. I was mildly surprised to find that no such noun appears in current editions of The Oxford English Dictionary or Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, though grume, pronounced grūm, derived from the Latin grumus (little heap or hillock), is listed in the OED as "1. A lump, obs. 2. A clot of blood; blood in a clotted or viscous condition. Also, any viscous fluid or mass of fluid." My search for the elusive grumus took me to Lippincott's Medical Dictionary, published in 1906. There I found grumus, again pronounced with a long first u, nestled somewhere between Gruber's bougies (to paraphrase the definition, these were little medicated sticks of gelatin put in the ear canal) and guano (“. . .the excrement of sea-fowl . . . used with benefit, internally and externally, as a remedy in different forms of lepra.” Whoa!). Lippincott's defined grumus as "a clot of milk or blood; a curd; thick or viscid fluid, as pus."

Dessert, anyone?

Enough of etymology. I must return to the roentgenology department in search of the next fascinoma.

Footnotes

1. Note to Teutonic purists: It's much easier for me to type “oe” than to figure out how to repeatedly insert an “o” with an umlaut, so we'll stick with the English spelling of Roentgen↑

2. Mundsen RF, Hess KR. “Ditzels” on Chest CT: Survey of Members of the Society of Thoracic Radiology. AJR 2001; 176:1363-1369.↑

3. Hugo Z. Hackenbush was the character played by Groucho Marx in the movie “A Day at the Races.” By the way, the movie includes a hilarious scene with the Marx Brothers performing a medical examination on Margaret Dumont's character. When one of the other characters calls for an X-ray, Harpo responds by producing a stack of newpapers and silently (of course) hawking “Extras.”↑

Back to the Salt Mines

Salt Miners, Winsford, England

Quick! Without resorting to Google, can you name the capital of Missouri? Hint: it's not Missouriopolis. But, according to fellow blogger Elektra Tig, Missouriopolis was under consideration as the name of the capital of Missouri around 1821. My home state is unique in being the only state to incorporate its name into the name of its capital--Indianapolis, which lies at the center of the state. Residents of Iowa Center, a town laid out at the center of that state in 1855, had high hopes that their town would be the capital of Iowa. Unfortunately for them, Iowa Center lost out to another city (bonus question: what is the capital of Iowa?), so Indiana remains the only state having the distinction of a capital which both incorporates the name of the state and which lies at the center of the state.

And then there's a town built in the middle of Kansas. It includes only the first three letters of the state's name, but Kanopolis rolls off the tongue more easily than Kansasopolis. The town was built on the site of Fort Harker, an Army base important in the Indian Wars from 1867 till it was abandoned in 1872. After the fort was closed, the land and buildings were acquired by private individuals with the intent of building a city that would become the state capital. Kanopolis was established in 1887, and was laid out to accommodate up to 150,000 residents. The developers had visions of Kanopolis being not just the state capital. Since it also lies in the middle of the country, they thought it should be the capital of the U.S. as well. Alas, neither dream came to fruition. Kanopolis didn't even become the county seat. This honor fell to nearby Ellsworth, which would seem to have had an unfair edge in Ellsworth County.

Like many small towns, Kanopolis was once more prosperous than it is today. The U.S. Census of 2000 counted only 543 residents. Businesses which once thrived have left town, although one industry, salt mining, still has a presence in Kanopolis. The town has the good fortune to sit on a large vein of salt, which brings me (finally) to the topic of this post.

I seldom eat in the doctors' dining room when I work at the hospital these days. I prefer to carry my lunch and eat in the relative peace and quiet and absence of political rhetoric in the radiology department. When I did eat lunch upstairs, I often found myself leaving the room by saying it was time to get back to the salt mines. I never stopped to consider the origin of this phrase until I started researching the salt mining industry in connection with my new-found interest in Kanopolis. In A Dictionary of Catch Phrases from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, by Eric Partridge (edited by Paul Beale), the author states that the phrase comes "from the Western idea--not far from wrong at that!--that, in both imperial and in communist Russia, political prioners were sent to do hard labour in the salt mines of Siberia." He also writes, "Col. (Albert F.) Moe thinks back to the mines! is the earliest form and attributes it to a play of the 1890s, Siberia, with its dramatic poster of a party of Russians proceeding to Siberia 'under the lashes of the Cossacks.'"

So there you have it. I tried to find a picture of some hapless Kansans toiling in the salt mines, but the closest I could come was the photo of English salt miners at the beginning of this post. They don't look all that miserable, but then I suppose things were a lot worse in Siberia when the only tools available were picks and shovels. Let's face it--almost anything would be worse in Siberia, regardless of the tools available.

Link:
Kanopolis History by Jesse Manning

Chiaroscuro

A couple weeks ago, I attended a lecture at the Snite Museum of Art at The University of Notre Dame. For those readers who missed the gripping account of my little adventure, you will find a link at the end of the current post.

Emerging from the museum onto the hallowed grounds of academe, I decided to play the part of the peripatetic and walk around campus looking for photo opps. Please appreciate that I use peripatetic here in the sense of "a person who walks from place to place," and not the sense of the peripatetic as a follower of Aristotle, who taught his students by walking around and talking at the same time, a technique overused on the TV show, "The West Wing." I mean really, could they possibly have a conversation without everyone involved striding urgently around the White House?

It was a clear, sunny day, and I did manage to get a couple tourist snapshots of campus landmarks.

The Golden Dome

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart

I believe the person on the sidewalk is President Jed Bartlett, a Notre Dame alumnus, looking for someone to talk to as he is walking.

I also stopped by the War Memorial Fountain, which was not running due to the cold weather.

War Memorial Fountain

Inside sits this sphere. After I converted the photo to black and white, I thought this might be an example of chiaroscuro photography. I will leave the final judgment up to those who might actually know something about art and photography.


No one could be more surprised than I that I would come up with the term chiarascuro. I have encountered it a few times in recent reading, but it's not a word that comes up in my daily conversations. I even wrote it down on an index card when I saw the word in Janet Malcolm's book on photography as art, Diana and Nikon. On the same card I wrote ineluctable ("impossible to avoid or evade"), and meretricious ("of or relating to a prostitute; brassy, cheap, flashy, tacky, tawdry," etc.). Unfortunately, I don't remember the context of any of these words, but aren't they cool?

The Marx Family ca. 1913. L to R: Groucho, Gummo, Minnie (mother), Zeppo, Frenchy (father), Chico, Harpo.

So what is chiaroscuro? Let me summarize my intensive education on this topic, acquired at Wikipedia. In Italian, chiaroscuro means, literally, light-dark. The word originally applied to a method of drawing developed during the Renaissance. The artist applied a light material, such as white gouache, to a dark background, reversing the usual process of applying dark strokes to a white background. Consider this work by Zoppo, who was not the sixth Marx Brother (actually, there was a 6th, Manfred, who died in infancy), but an Italian artist.

The Resurrection

Marco Zoppo (Italian, 1432/33?–1478?)
Brush and brown wash, highlighted with white gouache, over black chalk, on blue laid paper washed pale brown; 14 1/2 x 11 1/8 in. (36.8 x 28.1 cm)
Purchase, Rogers and Harry G. Sperling Funds and Florence B. Selden Bequest, 1998 (1998.15)
Courtesy of www.metmuseum.org

The term chiaroscuro is more broadly applied to the effect of light modelling in drawing, painting and printmaking, where highlights and shadows produce the illusion of three dimensions in a 2D work of art. The interested reader can learn more at the Art Studio Chalkboard website of Ralph Larmann, a faculty member at my alma mater, the University of Evansville. A link is supplied at the end of this article.

Chiaroscuro has been adapted to photography and cinematography as well, where it may also be called low-key. Here is an attempt I made at a low-key photo, illuminating a small statue in with a flashlight in a dark room, resulting in strong shadows and highlights.



Link to post about Lola Alvarez Bravo

Link to The Art Studio Chalkboard, Topic: Chiaroscuro

Spiro and Me

Spiro T. Agnew by William Frederick Behrends

It should be obvious to even the casual reader of Lugubrious Drollery that the author has a tendency to play for laughs, often with rather sorry results. This trait goes way back. One example from my high school days came to mind recently. For reasons that escape me now, the local paper published personal profiles of at least some of the seniors. It was a small class, and they may have featured everyone during the school year. As I recall, there was no interview involved, but rather a form to be filled out with vital facts about interests and extracurricular activities, and so forth. I was, for the most part, truthful until I got to the question about favorite book. In general, I have trouble answering questions about favorites. Color? Don't really care. Food? Key lime pie, perhaps, but then again, what about sweet potatoes, or Jarlsberg cheese, or M&Ms? You have no idea what an effort it was for me to come up with even that short list.

And when it comes to books, well, there are just too many possibilities. So, for my senior profile, I invented a book out of thin air--The Life and Times of Spiro T. Agnew. I guess the local weekly paper didn't have a fact-checking staff, because this little prevarication got published.

Why did Mr. Agnew pop into my head at the crucial moment? It's hard to tell. The name just sounds funny to begin with, he was funny-looking, and he seemed a cariciture of conservatism in an age of social upheaval (1970-71). His attack on the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism" is a classic, whether he wrote it himself or not. As vice president, Agnew became an icon of all that was wrong--and there was so much--with the Nixon administation, not unlike Dick Cheney during the last 8 years. Agnew resigned from office in disgrace before his boss, Tricky Dick Nixon did, setting the stage for Gerald Ford to be named VP and then to rise to the Presidency when Nixon resigned. I must thank Agnew for adding the legal phrase nolo contendere to my vocablulary. In 1972, he pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion, stemming from his shady activities as governor of Maryland before his terms as vice president.

I recently discovered that despite his legal troubles and subsequent disbarment, a bust of old Spiro is displayed in the Capitol. Back in 1886, the Senate passed a resolution that a marble bust of each vice president should be placed in the Capitol. Considerable foot dragging occurred when it came to commissioning a bust of Agnew, but ultimately, some 22 years after he resigned, Agnew appeared at the unveiling of his bust in 1995.

Agnew was such a cultural icon, that he appeared on a watch, a la Mickey Mouse. I didn't own a Spiro Agnew watch, but I was able to buy a T-shirt with an image of one. I still have this T-shirt and cling to it as symbol of my lost youth, even if I can't fit into it anymore.


Well, as usual, I have strayed far afield from the topic at hand. I started off discussing humor--sort of. Rather than follow the trend of some bloggers and reveal my innermost angst and psychic aberrations (cue Morris Albert singing "Feelings"), I chose to include terms I find amusing in my Blogger profile. I thought I was being fairly original. I should have known better. One of the features of the Blogger profile is that the key words entered there are hyperlinked to other Blogger profiles with the same key words. Thus, when I click on the words I listed as "interests," I find the following numbers of people who used the same words:

Shiny objects: 1000
Concrete: 307
Dust bunnies: 29
Weather Maps: 3
Hockey Pucks: 3
Dietary Fiber: 1
Tropical parasites: 1

Considering the millions and millions of pathetic losers in the blogosphere, I guess coming up with the same phrase as even 1000 other bloggers is relatively original. At least for the time being, I can claim to be unique in my interest in dietary fiber and tropical parasites. And wouldn't the world be a better place if more people joined me?


Link to U.S. Senate Art and History page about Spiro T. Agnew
Link to article about Agnew watch at "I Remember JFK"
Link to my Blogger profile

Mavericks

I was going to include some of the information in this post in another article I'm working on for Lugubrious Drollery, but then I decided I should ratchet up my already intense research efforts a notch by reading a relevant book, or at least part of a book, before publishing the article. Or maybe I'll just look at the pictures, if the book has any. I've ordered it from Amazon, but in the meantime, I know readers of LD are thirsting for knowledge. So gather around the fire and quaff deeply, campers.

Without giving too much away, I will say that the article I'm working on involves an historical figure who could have been considered a maverick. Rather than waiting to share my desultory thoughts on the word maverick, I offer them up now.

First, let's review the meanings of the word desultory, which I have to look up any time I'm tempted to use it. From the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary:

Main entry: des-ul-to-ry
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin desultorius, literally, of a circus rider who leaps from horse to horse, from desilire, from de- + salire to leap--more at sally (a word I used to good effect in a previous post*, if I do say so myself--ed.)
1: marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose
2: not connected with the main subject
3. disappointing in progress, performance, or quality

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, my thought process in a nutshell.

As I have pondered the word maverick these last few days, my thoughts have skipped like a flat stone hurled sidearm across a stagnant and algae-choked pond. I have ruminated upon a real-life Texas cattleman (who should be used to rumination), an old TV western, a cheap Ford sedan, and last year's Presidential campaign.

Let us begin (I know what you're thinking--all that, and he hasn't even begun?) with the etymology of the word maverick, from the old standby, The Online Etymology Dictionary:

Maverick: 1867, "calf or yearling found without an owner's brand," in allusion to Samuel A. Maverick (1803-70), Texas cattle owner who was negligent in branding his calves. Sense of "individualist, unconventional person" is first recorded 1886, via notion of "masterless."

My earliest recollection of hearing the word maverick, like many of the things that persist in my brain while more important data are lost, comes from television. I grew up on a duck farm, and there was no need to brand our stock. Even if they got outside the pen, they wouldn't waddle far, so our conversations would never include statements like, "I've got to saddle up the palomino and round up the mavericks." For one thing, we didn't have a palomino, or any other kind of horse. There was no desultory jumping around from horse to horse, circus style, at our farm. For another thing, there was no rounding up to be done. We would just grab the escapees by their necks and lift them back over the fence.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah--TV. One of the coolest actors of our time is James Garner. Back in the fifties, he was the star of the western Maverick. His character was Bret Maverick, a carefree gambler, and of course, he was an "individualist" and "masterless." Whether he was supposed to be related to Samuel Maverick, the negligent cattleman, I don't know, and I don't feel like going to Wikipedia right now to try to find out. I have gone to the trouble to go to YouTube to embed the intro to the show here.



Fast forward now to 1970. That was the year my father purchased the second new car he had bought during my lifetime. The first was a 1964 VW Beetle, which I had commandeered. A frugal man, he went for economy again and bought a Ford Maverick. On those occasions when I drove it, I didn't feel nearly as cool as Bret Maverick, but I did prove that a tinny Ford with a four-cylinder engine and a three-on-the-tree manual shift could, however briefly, exceed one hundred miles an hour without blowing up--a fact I never shared with my father.

In case you don't remember the sleek lines of the Ford Maverick, I'm posting a picture here. I wasn't enamored enough with the Maverick to take a picture of it. I was fortunate enough to find a picture of one at Wikimedia Commons. It's even the same color as ours, although ours didn't have such fancy chrome lug nuts.


Lastly (do I hear cheers from the audience?), during last year's Presidential campaign, the word maverick was bandied about a good deal. Sen. John McCain, trying his best to distance himself from the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, painted himself as a "Washington outsider," (who happens to have been in Washington since 1982). He and his running mate Sarah Palin spent a lot of time calling each other "reformers" and "mavericks" even though McCain voted with the Republicans 93.8 percent of the time during the 111th Congress. You want a maverick? How about Sen. Olympia Snowe (R, Maine), who voted with the GOP only 34.4 percent of the time? Now, there's a woman who can say, "Thanks, but no thanks," and mean it.

So, there you have it, cowpokes and cowgirls--a brief ride through the deep recesses of my mind. Happy trails until we meet again.

*Link to previous post, "Step Into My Bidet," wherein the author cleverly uses the word sally.
Link to Online Etymology Dictionary

@ Revisited

In a previous post, I discussed the grammalogue, or logogram, "@" which is ubiquitous in email addresses. I concluded that the proper term for this symbol is the "commercial at." Ah, if only 'twere so simple. From Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, I have learned of an abundance of colorful terms, often related to animal anatomy, which are applied to "@":

In German, it is frequently called Klammeraffe, “spider monkey” (you can imagine the monkey’s tail), though this word also has a figurative sense very similar to that of the English “leech” (“He grips like a leech”). Danish has grisehale, “pig’s tail”, but more often calls it snabel a, “a (with an) elephant’s trunk”, as does Swedish, where it is the name recommended by the Swedish Language Board. Dutch has apestaart or apestaartje, “(little) monkey’s tail” (the “je” is a diminutive); this turns up in Friesian as apesturtsje and in Finnish in the form apinanhanta. Finnish also has kissanhäntä, “cat’s tail” and, most wonderfully, miukumauku, “the miaow sign”. In Hungarian it is kukac, “worm; maggot”, in Russian “little dog”, in Serbian majmun, “monkey”, with a similar term in Bulgarian. Both Spanish and Portuguese have arroba, which derives from a unit of weight or volume that Professor Stabile suggests is closely related to that of the amphora — 25lb weight (just over 11kg) or six Imperial gallons (nearly 23 litres). In Thai, the name translates as “the wiggling worm-like character”. Czechs often call it zavináč which is a rolled-up herring or rollmop; the most-used Hebrew term is strudel, from the famous Viennese rolled-up apple sweet. Another common Swedish name is kanelbulle, “cinnamon bun”, which is rolled up in a similar way.

The most curious usage, because it seems to have spread furthest from its origins, whatever they are, is snail. The French have called it escargot for a long time (though more formal terms are arobase or a commercial), but the term is also common in Italian (chiocciola), and has recently appeared in Hebrew (shablul), Korean (dalphaengi) and Esperanto (heliko).

Links:
"Where It's At," by Michael Quinion
My previous post "@"

Sarah Palin Progresses Her Political Ambition at the Expense of the English Language

PALIN: It would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration, yes. And I speak for other Republicans, other Republican governors also, they being willing also to, again, seize this opportunity that we have to progress this nation together, a united front.

Thus spake Sarah Palin (pictured above in Kuwait in 2007 after she acquired her first honest-to-goodness U.S. Passport) in a recent interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Sarah, please, PROGRESS IS AN INTRANSITIVE VERB! Please, please, please, just shut up and go back to Alaska!

Petitio Principii

Comfortably lounging in my glass house, in my last post, I tossed a stone or two in the direction of those who use the phrase "begs the question" to mean "invites the obvious question." In my post (since edited), I presented what I believed was the correct usage--"avoids answering the question." While this is one usage of the phrase, according to alt-english-usage.org, the oldest usage is in logic, where begging the question implies a circular argument. Here are excerpts from the explanation by Mark Israel, at alt-english-usage.org:

Fowler defines "begging the question" as the "fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself."

and

Many people unaware of the technical meaning of "to beg the question" in logic use it in one of two looser senses. The first of these, "to evade the question, to duck the issue", is attested since 1860 (WDEU). The second, "to invite the obvious question, (with an inanimate subject) to raise the question", is now the most commonly heard use of the phrase, although we have found no mention of it prior to The Oxford Guide to English Usage, 1st edition (1983), and it is not yet in most dictionaries. The meaning of the adjective "question-begging" does not seem to have suffered a similar broadening.

I also learned that the Latin for this fallacy is petitio principii. Thank goodness I corrected myself before one of my dozens of potential readers caught my error.

Prolixity

In the previous post, I talked about our visit to Salem, Mass., and landmarks associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne. I am doing my best to read The House of the Seven Gables. In Chapter XI, "The Arched Window," Hawthorne goes into a prolonged description (all his descriptions seem prolonged) of an Italian organ grinder and his monkey who plied their trade on the streets of the New England town (based on Salem) where the novel is set. He writes, "The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's feet." In the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, I found the following:

Main Entry: pro·lix
Pronunciation: \prō-ˈliks, ˈprō-(ˌ)\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French prolix, from Latin prolixus extended, from pro- forward + liquēre to be fluid — more at liquid
Date: 15th century
1 : unduly prolonged or drawn out : too long
2 : marked by or using an excess of words
synonyms see wordy
— pro·lix·i·ty \prō-ˈlik-sə-tē\ noun
— pro·lix·ly adverb

So it seems Hawthorne, who was given to prolixity in the sense of using an excess of words, considered the monkey's tail to be not only too long, but preposterously too long. Who is he to judge? Aren't monkeys supposed to have long tails?

In any case, the word reminded me of Prolixin, a brand name for the anti-psychotic drug fluphenazine. Although I have no reason to prescribe anti-psychotic drugs in my line of work, I will never forget Prolixin because of an encounter I had with a patient during a night on call on a psych rotation as a medical student. I believe it was at the county hospital, or maybe it was at the VA, and I had to interview a schizophrenic patient. He said to me, "I used to be big until they turned me into a baby with Proplipsin." I don't recall specifically why he showed up in the emergency room that night, or any of the rest of the conversation, but that statement, for some strange reason, has stuck with me. Partly, I suppose, it was the interesting pronunciation of the drug's name, and partly perhaps because on the face of it, it sounds absurd, but you can sort of understand what he meant--that he felt somehow diminished by his treatment.

Talk Smart and Influence People

Whenever I read John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, I feel a gnawing sense of inadequacy when I come across words that A) I've never seen before, or 2) I've looked up at least once before and forgotten the definitions. Here are some examples from my recent reading:

exiguous: excessively scanty

exigency: that which is required in a particular situation or a state of affairs that makes urgent demands

desultory: marked by lack of a definite plan or not connected to the main subject or disappointing in progress, performance, or quality

cynosure: one who serves to direct or guide, or the center of attention

sinecure: an office or position that requires little or no work but that usually provides an income

Words like this are beautiful, but, at least among the people I interact with every day, aren't going to come up in conversation very often, even if I could remember them for more than 6 hours.

If you like this sort of thing, check out Wordsmith.org and their Word a Day section.