“Relative humidity” is the sweat from your balls running down your sister-in-law’s leg.
In my humble
“He has dead, Jim.”
The flip side of that coin is the useless insertion of “be able to” in front of almost every verb. “The baby needs to be able to be fed.” Argh!
That one’s even worse. Just hearing that gives me the sick.
I don’t know if the phrase “He’s been diagnosed with Giant Crabs Syndrome” is technically grammatical (at least in some parallel universe), but it makes me want to go nucular.
Better to say “He’s got Giant Crabs Syndrome” or “His condition has been diagnosed as Giant Crabs Syndrome”.
What about, “He is attention-deficit?”
But you would never use “He’s” as “He has” in the sense of possession like this. “He’s nine dollars in his pocket,” could not be stretched to mean “He has nine dollars in his pocket.” It’s just wrong.
That might’ve worked in the early 1900s, but it’s pretty non-standard now. I remember seeing an odd contraction or two like that in some old first edition Bobbsey Twins books I inherited from my Mother (or maybe my Grandmother).
There’s a commercial for some ambulance chaser running currently. The line that gets me goes roughly:
If you have taken <name of psychoactive drug, maybe Zyprexa?> and now suffer from diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, liver disease, kidney disease, or death, please call us at XXX-XXX-XXXX.
So, exactly how many people who are suffering from death bother to call in, I wonder?
I’ve got attention-defi… Oh look. Pretty lights.
Fair enough, but keep in mind that that’s a personal taste, not a linguistic analysis.
I disagree. I’ve never heard any native English speaker say this with the intention of equating a person with a disease, nor have I, as a native English speaker, ever mistakenly thought that someone meant to do so. You seem to be arguing based on strict compositionality, that because “ADD” names a disease, “he’s ADD” has to mean that he is a disease. I don’t know what the correct linguistic analysis of “he’s ADD” is, but I’m not going to condemn it just because it fails to conform to my preconceptions about how language “ought” to work.
Whoa whoa whoa. First you make up a “rule” about the English language which you freely admit has no basis in actual usage, and then when people don’t conform to this rule, you call it “confusion”? I think you’re the one who’s confused.
“Illiterate? WRITE FOR HELP!!!”
Slight hijack, but since you’ve acknowledged that it’s okay to use the adjective form of a disease (if it exists) in this manner, can people (not on the boards, just in general) please stop bitching at me for calling people who suffer from mental retardation “retarded”?
Because guess what: they are! That’s the disease that they have: mental retardation. If you ask me, “What’s wrong with Lucy’s brother?”, I could respond, “He suffers from the disease of mental retardation”, but why would I want to construct such a bulky and awkward sentence when I could say exactly the same thing in two words? Adding to that, the people who bitch at me for this generally seem to have absolutely no problem with saying “He’s mentally retarded”…as though there were some other well-known form of retardation they might’ve mistakenly thought I was referencing.
I realize that the adjective “retarded” has entered the common lexicon as an insult. This does not alter the fact that it continues to apply to the condition certain people actually possess. You know what other term I hear bandied about as a general derogatory on a day to day basis? Yeah, you do; it has three letters and rhymes with “ghey”. And what do we, as people who understand context and can therefore grasp the concept a particular speaking is attempting to convey, do when we hear that term used toward the people who actually possess that quality? We figure that hey, maybe the speaker is referring to the fucking quality implied by the adjective and not trying to insult the person out of nowhere for no fucking reason whatsoever! And, unlike its three-letter counterpart in being turned into an insult by assholes, this one actually has a source that corresponds with the very root of the word itself! Amazing!
So, what is wrong with the person who suffers from mental retardation? Well, he’s retarded*. Get the fuck over it.
- Mentally, you understand. He’s not retarded in, say, his foot, or whatever the fuck other type of retardation to which I could potentially be referring. Just wanted to clear that up.
“Hyperthyroid” is actually an adjective, and thus there’s nothing wrong with “he might be hyperthyroid.” The noun would be “hyperthyroidism.”
I agree, though, that is annoying.
THANK YOU! You are my best friend this week. 
A condition is diagnosed, not a person.
Don’t underestimate the diagnostic capabilities of giant crabs.
He’s ADD
He’s Attention Deficit Disordered
One day I’ll rant on the explosive use of acronyms in the English language.
Ah yes, the EUOA, pisses me off too.
Blame it on psychiatry. (As you all well know, I’m in favor of them catching the blame for anything they might be liable for)
If your diagnosis is “schizophrenic”, hardly anyone says you “have schizophrenia”. God forbid, that almost implies that it could happen to almost anyone! Oh no, you are a schizophrenic!
What’s that? I can’t blame the shrinks for that, because they’ve been actively campaigning against that way of thinking for years? And in fact my arch-enemies, the NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) folks, the ones who think forced treatment is just lovely and who embrace the medical model of mental illness without reservation, are in agreement that conceptualizing a person as their illness is demeaning and insulting and inherently limiting?
Oh.
::climbs off soapbox::
Seriously, damn near everyone politically active about mental health issues comes to unprededented degrees of accord on this. It’s almost unanimous: people who have a diagnosis of mental illness of one sort or another overwhelmingly do not benefit from being labled with the noun-version of the illness they are thought to suffer from. It accentuates stigma. It tends to cause people, both within the MH system and outside of it, to treat folks so diagnosed as the epitome of the worst or most frightening aspects of the disease they are thought to suffer from. People who are mental patients benefit from being treated as people foremost, as people who happen to have a disability expressed as this or that mental illness, perhaps, as a modification of that. (*assuming one accepts one’s diagnosis and the enclosing diagnostic description and so forth. I myself do not prefer to be regarded as disabled by schizophrenia, and instead redefine it as a difference rather than a disease and consider myself proud of it as an identity-factor, and consider myself as healthy and legally viable as any non-schizophrenic).
The diagnostic categories tend to persist, whereas the phrase “has ____” tends to encourage a sense of the transient nature of most diagnosable conditions, mental and physical alike. So I’m totally in favor of that shift of emphasis, and opposed to the spread of traditional mental-health attitudes that conflate the person and the diagnosis. You are not “the gall bladder in room 17” and you are not “Hepatitis C” and you are not “obsessive-compulsive disorder”, and you are right to resent and reject being defined by your diagnosis.