I periodically run into people in my line of work who absolutely insist on mangling the pronunciation and/or spelling of perfectly normal words for absolutely no reason whatsoever. 95% of the time, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Ok, I understand if you’re not from around here, or if you trained somewhere else, and I don’t even get bent out of shape over people who absolutely insist on spelling it “anaesthesia” and “paediatrics” (this is Canada, after all). But what in the name of all that is holy is a fricking sontimeter? (Answer: A centimeter measured by someone who has hung around with too many obstetricians.) I remember the first time I spent any time in the OR, and the anesthetist I was hanging out with insisted on talking about sontimeters of water (cmH2O) for airway pressures. Part of me wanted to know whether he measured blood pressure in millaimeters of mercury. The origins of the sontimeter are confusing and mysterious, but I suspect it has something to do with the French, since it’s sort of halfway to being a “sontimaytre,” which would be the proper way to pronounce it. I’m not normally one to go on a tear about French, but in this case, they’ve gone too bloody far. (Can you tell I spent a chunk of the recent past listening to someone who continually referred to sontimeters? Grrr!)

It’s the same thing as people who refer to the “cervyecal spine” instead of the “cervical spine.” I’ve heard this rationalized as being unrelated to the part of the female reproductive tract, but since cervix itself means “neck,” it’s a pretty fair bet that the female reproductive chunk was named after the thing that holds your head up, not t’other way around. Cervix is sir-vicks, not sir-vikes; it’s sir-vi-cal, not sir-vye-cal. Why this eludes people eludes me.

On a totally unrelated note, I stumbled on this again earlier today. “Can you imagine what the net’s raw content will look like when all the half-literate morons in the U.S. can publish any text that their tiny minds ooze? The very thought makes me want to refill my glass with the ’56 Chateau Lafite. America’s Intelligentsia will need some serious Digital Butlers guarding our Offramp on the Digital Highway’s Mailing Lists (damn metaphors) when this comes to pass.”

Umm, I dunno. A lot like blogger.com?