Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . New, and not so new, medical words - The BMJ - The BMJ - Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is updated every three months (“on a quarterly basis” as they put it—they mean “quarterly”). The latest list of updates and additions, published in March 2021, contains 744 items. There are four categories:

1. Words that are completely new to the dictionary This list (151 entries, of which 41 have two new definitions each) starts with “à la Chinoise” and ends with “zoomer”. A zoomer is either a member of Generation Z (Figure 1) or, as a more recent usage has it, a baby-boomer who has reached middle-age or retirement age. More succinctly, a baby boomer who hasn’t grown up. As a baby boomer, I recognize the phenomenon. Perhaps “Zoomer”, one who communicates using Zoom, will make it into the dictionary next time. The verb to Zoom is already there. I’m a frequent Zoomer, so there’s an example to cite. Other meanings include a Nintendo flight simulator joystick, a robotic toy dog, and a Canadian radio station.
2. New sub-entries Compound words or phrases that are now included under other headwords (235 entries). The list starts with “aceboy”, included under “ace”, a colloquial term for a close male friend, said to have originated as an African–American usage, but now mainly used in Bermuda. It ends with “zither-like”.
3. New senses of old words This list (322 entries) starts with “abstain”, meaning “to stay away from one’s workplace, school, etc”, a South Asian usage. It ends with “zizzy”, “characterized by or involving a buzzing or whizzing sound”.
4. Additions to unrevised entries New senses, compound words, or phrases that were already included as draft entries appended to the end of existing entries, now fully incorporated (36 entries). These are also included in the other categories.

Figure 1. Conventional and alternative names for the generations of Western populations; taken from various sources, including the US Census Bureau

Items that are new to the dictionary do not have to have been recently coined—the dictionary is constantly catching up. Figure 2 shows a frequency distribution of the numbers of entries whose first citations date from each century since 1100; some are surprisingly old.

Figure 2. Frequency distribution of the dates of the first citations of the new entries in the OED, March 2021 (excludes one entry cited from early Old English)

The newly entered words of medical, or quasi-medical, interest are listed in Table 1. The list includes two pharmacological compounds.

Table 1. New medical or quasi-medical entries in the OED included in the March 2021 list

Gentamicin was first described in 1963, so it is surprising that it has taken so long for it to appear in the dictionary. Although the name was originally spelt “gentamycin”, the spelling was changed early on to “gentamicin” on the recommendation of the American Medical Association’s generic names committee, because, unlike many other antibiotics whose names end in –mycin, it was isolated from a genus of Micromonospora, not from Streptomyces organisms. Even so, a PubMed search shows that the spelling with –mycin occurs in about 10% of publications. Indeed, if you did not search databases for incorrect as well as correct spellings of gentamicin, you would miss several publications, including systematic reviews, that use the incorrect spelling.

The other compound, gentianine, seems to have made little impact, although it was mentioned in Chemical Abstracts as long ago as 1946. A PubMed search yielded only 23 hits, mostly in vitro and animal studies. It’s said to have hypotensive, muscle relaxant, and anti-inflammatory properties.

One set of entries that stands out, as it were, from the list are the five slang terms for the penis. This is by no means an exhaustive list, although one might get exhausted just thinking about it (Table 2).

Table 2. Slang and euphemistic terms for the penis. Apart from the OED, my sources include:
Ayto J. Euphemisms. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
Holder, RW. The Faber Dictionary of Euphemisms. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.
Holder, RW. TA Dictionary of Euphemisms. Oxford: OUP, 1995.
Neaman J, Silver C. In Other Words. A Thesaurus of Euphemisms. UK: Angus & Robertson, 1991.

But the term I like best is “gentleman scientist”, defined as “a financially independent man who studies science, typically without having a salaried attachment to a scientific body or institution”. The dictionary cites an example from 1895 and also an article from a 1975 issue of the New Scientist magazine: “The days of the gentleman scientist are over; we’re professionals, we’re paid well …”. Consequently, the dictionary labels this “now chiefly historical”, but if that is so it should, in my view, be revived. It might be nice to be thought of as a gentleman scientist, were it not for the fact, judging from the activities of many twitterati, that the juxtaposition is a contradiction in terms.

Jeffrey Aronson is a clinical pharmacologist, working in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society.

Competing interests: None declared.

This week’s interesting integer: 319 Geometric numbers 319 is a toothpick number, as illustrated in the diagrams below (a) Lay down a toothpick (black) (b) Add a toothpick at each end at right angles (red) (c) Repeat (orange) (d) Repeat (green) (e) Keep repeating; after 25 cycles you will reach the pattern below, which contains 319 toothpicks Named numbers 319 is a happy number; calculate 32 + 12 + 92 = 91; then 92 + 12 = 82; 82 + 22 = 68; 62 + 82 = 100; and 12 + 02 + 02 = 1; the happy numbers up to 331 are shown in the figure below: super-d numbers, n, are such that d × nd contains a string of d digits; so, like 318, 319 is a super-2 number, since 2 × 3192 = 203522, which contains 22 as a substring the prime factors of 319 are 11 and 29, whose digits sum to 13, as do the digits of 319 itself; that makes 319 a Smith number; since its digits are all different it is therefore also a hoax number 319 is an Ulam number the divisors of 319 are 1, 11, 29, and 319, which sum to 360, which is relatively prime to 319 (they have no divisors in common); that makes 319 a Duffinian number the mean of its divisors = 360/4 = 90; since that is an integer, 319 is an arithmetic number 319 is a lucky number 319 = the 56th prime (P56 = 263) + 56 Semiprimes 319 is a semiprime = 11 × 29; since its two factors are of equal length, it is also a brilliant number; it is also an emirpimes, since its reversal, 913 = 11 × 83 Sums of 319 319 is the sum of consecutive integers in three ways:              159 + 160              24 + 25 + 26 + 27 + 28 + 29 + 30 + 31 + 32 + 33 + 34               4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19 + 20 + 21 + 22 + 23 + 24 + 25  319 is the sum of 11 consecutive odd numbers = 19 + 21 + 23 + 25 + 27 + 29 + 31 + 33 + 35 + 37 + 39 319 is the sum of three consecutive primes = 103 + 107 + 109 319 is the sum of consecutive composite numbers in four ways:              159 + 160              105 + 106 + 108              35 + 36 + 38 + 39 + 40 + 42 + 44 + 45              26 + 27 + 28 + 30 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35 + 36 + 38 319 is the sum of four squares but no fewer. Lagrange’s four square theorem, which he proved in 1770, states that all integers can be expressed as the sum of four squares. However, although 284 can be so expressed (284 = 12 + 22 + 52 + 172), it cannot be expressed as the sum of two or three squares; not all numbers have this property The first three squares: 1, 4, and 9 319 = (92 × 42 × 12) – (9 × 4 × 1) – 941 Pythagorean There are four Pythagorean triples whose short legs are 319:              319, 360, 481              319, 1740, 1769              319, 4620, 4631              319, 50880, 50881 Of these, the first and fourth are primitive Miscellaneous