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”?
[QUOTE=Koxinga]
WAG: “c” stands for whatever the Latin equivalent is for the Spanish con, as in “chili con carne”. “s” stands for the Latin sans
[/QUOTE]
:smack: I should have thought of that. I suspect you’re right…thanks!
[QUOTE=Koxinga]
WAG: “c” stands for whatever the Latin equivalent is for the Spanish con, as in “chili con carne”.
[/QUOTE]
That’ll be “cum”. Please, hold all jokes until no children are present.
[QUOTE=Priceguy]
That’ll be “cum”. Please, hold all jokes until no children are present.
[/QUOTE]
There’s a village near here called Horton cum Studley.
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.
[QUOTE=Kairos]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Why is there a particular concern that the c might be unintentional as opposed to anything else that might be written?
[QUOTE=acsenray]
Why is there a particular concern that the c might be unintentional as opposed to anything else that might be written?
[/QUOTE]
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”.
[QUOTE=acsenray]
But presumably there’s context for the c in the same way as there is context for “pt allenqic penicillin,” isn’t there?
I wonder if the pattern of abbreviating everything with x’s is related to this somehow.
[/QUOTE]
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.
