On Language

A fellow a lot smarter than me once said that when you ask someone how they are doing as long as their answer does not include the words inoperable, incurable, or indicted they are basically OK.

Much has been written on language and sickness and it’s been written a lot more eloquently than I could ever do. In my own experience I’ve noticed that the term “cancer patient” is much preferred to “cancer victim,” or “cancer sufferer.” Cancer patients are spoken of as fighters or survivors.

I think that the words that tend to give most of us a bad case of the whips and jangles are the ones that are related to the medical profession. A good deal of those words are descriptive and scary like hemorrhage, arrest, blockage, or terminal. And let’s not forget that old classic, the one that always brings the crowd to its feet, cancer.

Beyond these obvious ones are the gems that so many of us have learned from the media, the words that started as medical industry jargon. All industries have jargon and all jargon should serve the same purpose: quick, direct, concise information. Jargon is no more than a shorthand borne out of the necessity to get an established idea or concept across quickly. I suppose if one saves time talking and explaining one can devote those precious seconds to doing something useful.

A problem arises if jargon loses its specificity and begins to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Corporate business jargon with its “action points,” “actionable items,” “human resources,” and “memorandums of understanding,” is the best example. Here jargon is a shield to hide behind. Jargon assures that no one knows what anyone else is going on about and therefore it’s tough to lay blame when things go kablooey.

But medical jargon is usually damn direct and based in immutable science, the meanings pretty well chiseled into stone by use in popular media for decades and decades. I don’t care who you are but if you’re walking the corridor at some hospital to go visit old Uncle Sheldon after his hernia operation, and you hear behind you the nearing sound of running feet and a rattling cart of equipment while someone shouts, ”Room 307 STAT!” you will slam yourself flat against a wall in a heartbeat as that cart roars by.

As I met with an oncologist the other day and discussed different “protocols of treatment” (means what we can do for you) that may or may not be “curative” (means might make you better) and its ultimate impact on my “quality of life” (just how fucked up things will be for you for years to come), I realized that the very mention of these words in terms of my well-being was horribly sobering. For this set of jargon does not come into play if things are clear cut.

Go the emergency room with a broken bone and medical jargon is not spoken. Actually a version of craftsman or woodworker jargon comes into play: “We can FIX that, SET it, IMMOBILZE it, SPLINT it.” No vagueness there. They could be talking about a chair leg.

So if the expediency of medical jargon transforms to the vagueness of business jargon watch your ass. And the phrase that put it all together for me, the phrase that told me that they were not sure how to proceed, that they had possibly run out of pages in the playbook was when the doc, after detailing several courses of action that would at best maybe, just maybe help cure me, brightened, looked up from his papers and said, “I’ll be right back! I want to check if you qualify for some Clinical trials!”

Clinical trials: Those are things they do to try out new stuff. Because the old stuff wont necessarily work for you. That’s where they use placebos so you might not be getting the stuff you hope for. That’s where even if it doesn’t work out for you perhaps some other poor soul is helped out down the road because of the data you generated. And I guess they hope that the warm glow you get for being so selfless will improve your quality of life.