medicalese mistranslation

My Mom, brother and I recently sat down to review everything with the doctor before Mom's surgery and the doctor mentioned that one of her heart medications is prophylactic. Ken, an educated man but with no medical background, admitted to me afterwards that he said nothing at the time because I seemed satisfied but his first thought was "What are they going to be doing to my mother?!? She's 82, she can't get pregnant!"

Interesting how words change. Prophylactic, adjectival form of prophylaxis 'prevention of a disease', a euphemism for a condom, back in the day when they could not be sold as a contraceptive, but as a method of preventing the spread of venereal disease (also a euphemism for sexually transmitted diseases (or STD). From Greek προφυλαξ (prophulaksis) 'advance guard' (cf. French avantgarde), from pro- + phulaks 'guard' (cf. phulassein 'to keep guard before a place / house; (med.) to take precaution against'); it is not in Pokorny IEW, and its origin is summarized by Chantraine as inexplicable and obscure. (But I'm sure that hasn't stopped any �tymologistes manqu�s from connecting it to Sumerian, Basque, Etruscan, High Martian, and Proto-Lemurian.

Zed--ha; I'll bet your brother was wondering where exactly were they going to put that prophylactic! Quite understandable.

zmjezhd--have you written any dictionaries? Or contributed to any--if you don't mind saying, that is?

You see what can be the result of an overdose (no pun intended) of the usage of professional terms. If the doctor had given you the word preventive all would have been clear at once.

have you written any dictionaries?

Not yet ... but there is always hope.

Isn't there a wikipedic dictionary coming out soon?

Wikipedic On the wrong foot. From Ped backformed from the Greek Back Pedal meaning trying to get one's foot out of one's mouth and Wicked variously considered to be from Greek bad or from the Old English wickett meaning precariously balanced or badly cited see sticky wicket

Originally Posted By: zmjezhd

I'm sure that hasn't stopped any �tymologistes manqu�s from connecting it to Sumerian, Basque, Etruscan, High Martian, and Proto-Lemurian.

You left out Edenic.

Originally Posted By: Faldage

You left out Edenic.

Oh, good grief!

Originally Posted By: Jackie

Originally Posted By: Faldage

You left out Edenic.

Oh, good grief!

Quote:

The bulk of the research does not involve word pairs with fairly exact correspondence of sound and sense. The work is literally radical in that one has to first isolate the roots of the proposed twin words separated at birth since Babel. Edenic (Proto-Semitic or Ancient Hebrew roots plus non-Biblical roots recovered from other Semitic languages) demonstrates that language in its uncorrupted state is a natural science, much like physics or chemistry and created by the same Mind. Despite what we learned in school, language is NOT the result of the evolved grunting of cavemen who evolved from separate herds of apes. On the contrary, understood correctly, word roots are as perfect a value as are numbers. Just as there is a positive and negative number in math or matter and antimatter in physics, Edenic roots can also be charged with negative ions or carry the meaning of their antonyms. (Another proof of non-human engineering.) Let us quickly observe an example of Edenic's organic, modular 2-letter root system where sound-alike synonym and antonyms are observable.

hoo, boy!

grunt, grunt... babble, grunt...

Somebody came gallavanting into Wordorigins with this lovely piece of nonsense some time ago. There was someone else about the same time with the notion that each letter had a base meaning and every word could be understood on the basis of its set of letters, but I don't remember what they called it.

Is this related to Kabalarian tenets?
typo corrected to possible spelling mistake

You left out Edenic.

I stand corrected.