Last week, I reviewed biomedical words whose first written instances are attributed to 1970 in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This week I have explored 1971 (Table 1). Pharmacology again […]
Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Fifty years
Writing last week about the impossibility of planning without including elements of flexibility designed to account for unforeseen contingencies, I was reminded of what Nassim Taleb wrote in his book […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Planning
Self-assessment, which I covered last week, is generally an integral part of a personal development plan, now a de rigueur feature of life in universities and elsewhere. The word “plan” […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Thinking about thinking
Last week I considered the origins of the word “assessment”. It comes ultimately from an IndoEuropean root, SED, to put something down or sit. That in turn spawned the Latin […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Assessment
With severe osteoarthritis in my left hip, I am due to have a hip replacement. My having been a wicket-keeper for over 30 years can’t have helped, but I also […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Crusades
A movement is “a course or series of actions and endeavours on the part of a group of people working towards a shared goal; an organization, coalition, or alliance of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical fallacies
There are many types of fallacies and they are very common. The word comes from the Latin adjective fallax, deceitful or treacherous (of persons), misleading or deceptive (of things). The […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Laughter haters
Between 1532 and 1564 the French physician François Rabelais, initially using the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier, published a scurrilous five-volume novel La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, in which […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Laughter
Comprehensive though the list of phobias in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is, it omits some, notably gelotophobia. Nor does it include gelotophilia, katagelasticism, or gelasmus. The IndoEuropean root KLEG […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Clowns
The most unusual entry from among the nearly 600 that were added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in March of this year was coulrophobia, defined in the dictionary as […]