On 08/09/07 00:46, Amethyst Deceiver wrote:
> La Paranoia wrote:
>> Latinate words can be misused for deception, but some ugly
>> realities are best left covered over. The dentistís office is an
>> excellent place to find examples of Latinate euphemisms.
>> "Injections" have replaced "shots," and patients feel "discomfort"
>> instead of "pain." Like Orwell's deceivers, dentists use long,
>> Latinate words as a kind of Novocain to detach their patients from
>> what is happening. "Discomfort" does hurt less than "pain" because
>> using that word distances the sufferer from the reality and one can
>> use that distance to become a co- creator of reality, not merely
>> its victim.
>
> What country are you talking about? In the UK, dentists talk about
> injections. So do doctors. Have done for longer than I can remember.
Shots have a good Germanic origin, although I think they're now
penetrating the Romance languages in connection with football. (Not to
mention the French "chiottes", which give far more relief than a
dentist's chair. But I'm not going to mention those, because the word is
not polite.) But "pain"? That's a word that came into English from Greek
via Latin and French. In any case, my experiences in the dentist's chair
feel the same whether he uses a Latinate or an Anglo-Saxon drill.
Dentists are, in my experience, unlikely to believe that euphemisms will
make the slightest difference. When my dentist says "this will hurt a
bit", I simply do my best to lie back and think of England. Not to
mention the fantasies about what might happen with the dentist's
assistants. The fantasies never turn into reality, but for a few brief
moments they allow an escape from reality, much more effectively than
any tampering with words might do.
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
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