Sunday, July 10, 2011

CONTEXT: NOT THAT ADVANCED.

My mother, rest her soul, always told everyone, including my teachers, that I was very advanced (mostly it just made teachers think I was an insufferable little know-it-all, but she meant well). Naturally when my son (her first grandchild) came along, he was also very advanced, and she continued the trend with the rest of the grandkids to the point where at one point we decided we should all have t-shirts made that said VERY ADVANCED.

You can use what were called context clues when I was in 3rd grade to figure out which meaning of advanced I'm talking about here. That means you look how the word fits into the entire sentence or paragraph (in context) in order to figure it out; in this case I'm sure you quickly realized that my mother meant further along in mental development.

The error I keep seeing along these lines (or in this context) pertains to the term advance directive.  If we are smart and use context clues they will tell us that this term, when used in a medical report, uses the word advance to mean prior to something (in this case something medically catastrophic that leaves you unable to give or withhold consent for procedures such as CPR or ventilatory support).

Why, then, do I keep seeing it typed as advanced directive? It's not about a particularly sophisticated or complex directive, and directives in general don't have mental or physical development, and while the idea may or may not be ahead of its time, that's not what this phrase is talking about.

I have a theory, of course, and that is that people just type like monkeys, stringing words together without the slightest attention paid to context or even a general idea of whether things make sense. They're just out to get that line count and quality be damned.

You'll find that this is one of two theories I have about a lot of common MT mistakes. The other one is that some people are just stupid and should be punched in the head until they learn to do things my way right.

In any case, I plead with the MT community at large to pay attention to their context clues, and not make silly mistakes like typing advanced directive rather than advance directive, the latter being correct for reasons I've just explained above (which took several rewrites because this is an error that makes me want to kill things).

Thanks to Bee Dictionary and The Straight Dope General Questions Forum for helping me articulate all this.  :)

P.S.  I wanted to name this post Are You Experienced Advanced? but I couldn't figure out how to do strikethrough in the title.  Woe.
P.P.S.  I did learn how to use colors.  Red is bad.  Blue is good.  Purple means this is a concept you should engrave on the inside of your eyeballs.  :D

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