Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/196 page 30
    t tion (not ventrofixation), etc. Keep the hyphen, when it is necessary to avoid confusion and doubtfulness of mean¬ ing, as in cnret-spoon, heart-murmur, skin-disease, sleeping- sickness, etc. 4. Drop the useless -te from curet, brunet, fourchet, eti- quet, cigaret, etc. You have already lopped it off from cutlet, doublet, quartet, quintet, sextet, septet, racket, minuety fillet, corset, stylet, tourniquet, boquet, etc. Finish the job. In the same way cut off the useless -me from many words, writin % program, gram, centigram, etc., just as already we do telegram, anagram, diagram, epigram ; let us make an end of it. 5. Use figures instead of spelling out numbers, at least those above ten. 6. Anglicize foreign terms when a goodly portion of your readers will not understand them in the originals. Use italics as little as possible; use as few foreign words and terms as possible, because the vast majority of your audience cannot understand them (even if you do) ; and because there’s a deal of silly conceit in airing exotics of speech. 7. As to the spelling of chemic terms, accept the recom¬ mendations of the American Association for the Advance¬ ment of Science, which after years of dispassionate inves¬ tigation advised that we drop the final e in bromid, iodid, etc., and in bromin, iodin, atropin, quinin, etc. Say phenol instead of carbolic acid, glycerol, instead of glycerin, etc. 8. Abolish all diereses and accents. They cannot teach pronunciation, and they are useless luggage. Let us write oophorectomy, cooperation, ptomain, leukomain, etc., without the diereses. When a foreign word is Anglicized let us do it completely, and not drag over into our domain the exotics of foreign habit, leaving it, eg., neither English nor French. Leave to the poets the acute, the grave and the circumflex accents ; they are foreign to the spirit of our own tongue. 9. Do not bother about hybrid terms. A mule is a bet¬ ter animal than either its father or its mother. It is only
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3