I can appreciate a lood whooshing noise on auscultation, ma’am.
Good gravy, this thread is still going?
Mmm hmmm.
Quit makeing up words, you think “lood” makes you look smart?
Paging Gaudere 
Quit opressing me. What? Are you some kind of prescriptivist?
Well, I think Jackmannii’s borborygmi would eventually result in a lood whooshing noise! Lude two!
CMC fnord!
Stop digging. 
Dam you!
Bravissimo! (“You done real good!”)
Because the word’s roots require it. The “symptomat” is from the Greek “sumptoma-, sumptomat-” meaning symptom. In New Latin, the concept was expressed in “symptomatologia” from which the English word was derived.
Medical words very often are derivatives of Greek and Latin, but especially Greek, partly because the roots, prefixes and suffixes permit precise expression of a multitude of meanings and distinctions, and partly because the Greeks really did have a word for a whole bunch of its.
Wow, I actually wooshed someone? It’s a proud day for me.
Don’t feel bad, Irishgirl, it happens to the best of us.
I had a question for the language geeks here. I could start a new thread on it, but I think it’s relevant to this discussion:
What do linguists consider the standard for something to be a word? It seems to me that anything that people can reasonably understand would count as a word. For example, “applausage”. Even though it’s not in the dictionary, if I say it then people know what it means. Does that not make it a word?
I’m with Snowboarder Bo on this. Smart people need to stop being so smart. It just makes me feel more dumber.
I just wanted to say that cromulent is my new favoritist word.
Shakespeare was OK with making up words. Also he took many nouns and turned them into verbs, and nobody got on his case about it.
“Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle…”
Richard II - Act 2, Scene 3
People not only have to understand it, they have to do so without compensating for your “misuse” of the language. They have to get the concept of people clapping from the word “applausage,” instead of recognizing the connection to “applause.”
On topic, because I think I saw the horse breathe, my boss once told me:
Because of the layout of the venue, we bought fewer signs that year.
Meh, my finals start on Monday, so my brain is somehwere between “fried” and “barbequed”- Anything that doesn’t have a smiley or a big sign saying “whoosh” is going to whoosh me!
3 more weeks til I get to be a doctor (fingers crossed, touch wood, hail Mary etc etc) and at the moment I’m barely coherent.
[ Michael J. ‘Crocodile’ Dundee ] That’s not a knife. [ /Michael J. ‘Crocodile’ Dundee ]
You know, I bet lots of people did get on his case about it. Lots of people who have now been forgotten.
[QUOTE=irishgirl, a Simon Fistula Knife, a Liston Phalangeal Knife, a Vaughn Abcess Knife…[/QUOTE]
Interesting piece of trivia: knives invented by Paul Simon, Sonny Liston, and Robert Vaughn, respectively.
You can bet. But according to Robert MacNeil they did not.
A swing and a miss!
Whether or not you expect a doctor to talk about unrelated symptoms is irrelevant to the fact that he used a word that means “one set of related symptoms which leads to a specific diagnosis”. Just because you know that’s what he’s talking about doesn’t mean it’s a bad word. It has its own medical meaning that is different from the word “symptoms” and in fact refers to a specific subset of the set of items that “symptoms” refers to. I could say “not enough warm-blooded animals vote”, and you’d probably know I was referring to people; why not say “people”? The meaning of “symptomatology” is clear from the context if you don’t already know the word. Any perception of the doctor as artificially stuffy is your problem, and I suspect it’s an example of what psychologists would call autistic perception (which has nothing to do with autism): viewing things differently based on your personal needs, in this acse your personal need to have a cause you can fight for. There are better battles out there.
BTW, I missed the part where I asked you to pay my way through medical school.
He provided a particular meaning of “signage” which is in fact an actual, real-life meaning. The example he provided is very clear: it pinpoints a specific flaw. It’s just like saying that someone has a nice (productive) garden but poor landscaping. Again, you’re clinging on to your cause here. You’re fighting against established langu to dumb it down, not because you actually believe that people should talk stupidly, but because you’ve got too big an ego to admit you made a bad Pitting, learn a new word or two and move on.