So I’m completing a pathology report, and spell check is asking me to confirm spelling of various words in the report. It keeps feeding me words in spite of the fact that I keep hitting the “Ignore All” button. Two words that pop up are “porcine” and “adiposities”.
Now I am reasonably sure that I did not use either of these words in my report of what I saw in the patient’s surgical pathology specimen. Spell check apparently invented them out of thin air. I was briefly tempted to go back and put in an addendum saying “The presence of fat cells on the slide may be explained by inadvertent sampling of the patient’s porcine adiposities.”
I however thought better of it. There was a story we were told in residency of the time a patient sued the pathologist because his skin lesion was diagnosed as a “senile keratosis”. (Senile keratosis is an outmoded term for a common benign warty growth in older people, more commonly known as a seborrheic keratosis. As the story (possibly apocryphal) went, the patient was mortally insulted at having his skin growth called “senile”).
But now I have the phrase “porcine adiposities” going through my head and am wondering in what context I can use it in real life. Maybe the next time I’m on a plane or using mass transit and the morbidly obese person sitting next to me is taking up more than his/her share of space. “Pardon me, madam, but would you mind shifting your porcine adiposities?”
On second thought, maybe not.