A vocabulary that can’t keep up

It occurred to me the other day that I no longer understand the vocabulary of my life. The words I encounter increasingly make little or no sense and the proper pronunciation baffles the tongue while at the same time demanding a graduate degree in biology, or one of the other sciences I paid scant attention to in school.

It wasn’t always this difficult. From an early age I began to read with enthusiasm. “See Spot run Jane. Run Spot run.” Soon, “Fun with Dick and Jane” made way to bigger things. I learned about nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The sentences became longer and more complex. The books too became larger and an entirely new world opened up for me.

At university, I opted for a major in History and Philosophy. My reading spread to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the six or so volumes of Winston Churchill’s history of WWII. I read Kierkegaard and Plato. I worked my way through Kant and Sartre and understood them all; well maybe not Sartre, but then who does?

Unfortunately, as you age, many of the new words in your life don’t come from books anymore, unless you consider your local pharmacy as a sort of medical lending library. Today, instead of deciphering Aristotle’s syllogisms, I find myself trying to pronounce “Rosuvastatin.” Names like “Diltiazem”, “Apo Hydro”, “Perindopril Erbumine” and “M Panttoprazole” hardly roll off the tongue but they are as common now as “Oh my!” in a Bobbsey Twins mystery. Words like “Prednisone” and “Naproxin” never popped up in The House at Pooh Corner as I remember, but

I could be mistaken.

It does help that I also took four years of Latin along the way since it seems to be the fall-back language for all doctors. Despite - to use the term popular with the Office de la Langue Française – the “language first learned at home” doesn’t matter, be it English, French or Swahili. When explaining that nagging pain in your back or the ugly wart on your nose, doctors have a Latin term for everything.

When you become afflicted with ‘poly rheumatoid myalgia’ wouldn’t it be easier if the doctor just said it in plain English instead of sending you scurrying to the dictionary to find out that it simply means multiple joint pain? The same holds true for ‘sciatica’, a corruption of the medieval Latin term ‘ischiadicus’, or as you and I would call it, a pain in the hip.

Some time back the government, in its wisdom, decided we should all know exactly what was in the food we eat. It seemed a good idea at the time in this age when almost everything comes pre-processed in a can or a box, but once again it involved an entirely new vocabulary for your average shopper.

If you do take the time to read the list of ingredients slapped onto the side of every bottle, bag or box you will be interested to know that peanut butter contains diglycerides, soy sauce has aspergillus sojae and hot dog relish has just a dash of calcium chloride potassium sorbate. Even the dog’s Dentastix is laced with something called sodium tripolyphosphate.

I won’t go into a discussion of the ‘agreement’ part of a credit card application or the ‘user agreement’ that pops up so often when using the internet. Let’s just say banks, insurance companies and the folks at Revenue Canada could use a good dose of “Dick and Jane.”