So, now that I have a new job (yay!) processing accreditation for medical professionals’ continuing education, I spend a lot of my day trying to decipher doctors’ bad handwriting and nurses’ inscrutable shorthand. I’m getting the hang of it, but there’s one thing still puzzling me.
Nurses write “with” as a lowercase c with a line over it. I asked a nurse friend of mine what that was all about, and she explained that the line over the c was to show that it belonged there - in other words, that it’s not a “floating” c, but is there intentionally.
“Great,” says I, “but why a c?”
“I have no idea.”
So, teeming millions…why does a c mean “with?” And while you’re at it, why does an s mean “without”?
For what it’s worth, we pronounced cum as “coom” (rhymes with “broom”) in 9th grade Latin class. Admittedly, many of our pronunciations would have sounded like a foreign language to Marcus Antonius, but I believe this word we pronounced correctly.
Well, when you’ve got a full word, there’s already some “error coding” there. If you get something that looks like “pt allenqic penicillin” you’ve got a good idea what the nurse was writing, simply because the apparent characters written makes no sense. When you have a single letter, there’s none of the redundancies that may exist to illuminate confusion caused by sloppy writing.
The line over the “c” for “cum” is a very old Latin manuscript convention, very similar to the “R” with a line on the tail (often rendered as “Rx”) for the Latin word “Recipe”.
You have a point, but of all the letters that I can imagine someone mistaking a stray pen mark for, only “l” or “i” are going to be more common. Then again, I’m also one of those people who put a slash through my zeros, a line in my sevens, and other cues to demystify my writing. (And there are still times I cannot read it myself if I come to it out of context.)
My only question to the OP is: Is this really the first time you’ve encountere this, and you think it’s only used by nurses? I’ve seen/used it virtually my entire life.
