Sheesh. You’d think that health care professionals would be a little less woo.
I was just having lunch with some of them, and one said that most houses in Plymouth were haunted. They’re all built on Indian burial grounds, you see. She owned one, and it had a ghost she named Albert. It was a really old house, so of course it was haunted. Albert would go around shutting windows at random times.
General gasps of “Oh my God!” and “I’d move out of there so fast!”
Another woman talked about how her house was haunted by the ghost of her father. One night, her toddler was in the kitchen talking to someone. When asked who, she said “The nice man.” She pointed at the dead man’s favorite kitchen chair.
Following the success of the TV show ‘The Appprentice’ with Donald Trump, us Brits have our own version with Sir Alan Sugar. (Sugar is not so rich, but also not so slimy. :eek: )
Anyway there’s a high-powered + high paid job waiting for the winner.
And on one show, a contestant remarked “Of course I don’t believe in evolution. I’m not descended from a fish.” :smack:
Off topic: I think that’s the first time I’ve heard “woo” as a noun. At first I thought, “People who look/act/have the same last name as John Woo?” Then I thought, “Maybe ‘woo’ is a kind of collective pejorative for ‘asian.’” Then I thought, “Or maybe it’s a euphemism for ‘flamingly gay people.’” None of these made a lick of sense though until I fit it into some sort of context, wherein the etymology evidently revealed itself as the vocalization of that creepy Theremin-type “WoooOOOOooo” used in cheesy 50s horror flicks.
Having said that, and more on topic: What a bunch of woos. Although I might be inclined to call them “woowoos,” which suits the accompaniment of the circular motion you make with your index finger around your temple.
Woo is indeed short for woowoo, generally a person who believes in ghosts, Elvis sightings, Bigfoot, alien anal probes, tarotry, the Illuminati, the WTC being bombed by the Bush admin, and the healing power of magnets.
Oh - if we’re talking about healthcare professionals believing in ghosts and such, that doesn’t surprise me. You work the graveyard shift at a hospital (where of course many people have died), and the conversation naturally turns to hauntings. All the hospitals I’ve worked at were believed to be haunted by the staff.
ETA: A whoooole bunch of the nurses and doctors I’ve worked with smoke, too, so don’t be looking to healthcare professionals to be some kind of shining examples of logic and clear-thinking.
You should check out the Internet Infidels at iidb. The physicists and other scientists take a rather dim view of medical doctors. “Human mechanics” was one epithet that I recall.
The idea being (on that board, AFAICT) is that doctors don’t need to have a good skeptical mind to be able to diagnose and help people. A broken arm is a broken arm, a heart attack is a heart attack, whether or not you believe in ghosts, goblin, gods, etc.
Well, of course they’re haunted by the staff. I’ve seen them, late at night, wandering the corridors – all in white, with their deathly unfocussed eyes.
I’m taking notes on all the people in this thread who don’t believe. I’m going to spend eternity opening and closing their windows, chatting up their toddlers, and making weird blowing noises in their attic. We’ll see how cocky they act then.
