Anatomy!

Okay, I admit it, I'm generally kind of a tightass about what resources I'll use, especially online ones.  It's got to be the OED, Dorland's, the Merck Manual, Gray's Anatomy, etc.  I'm super excited, though, about a site I just found today which, while it does not have the authority of Gray's, is an excellent resource for anatomy.

Instant Anatomy is a site with a better interface than Gray's - a lot more user-friendly, if you know what I mean.  You basically can browse by clicking on pictures, and then you get a surprisingly informative graphic like this one showing the sciatic nerve.  It's not as detailed or in-depth as Gray's, but sometimes you just need to find out something real quick and don't want to read all about the triangles of the neck or whatever.  It will definitely be more useful for feedback, which makes me happy.

I hope you find it useful as well.  Let me know in comments how you like it, if you want.

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

When you go to kiss your honey and your nose is kinda runny...

Mucous and mucus. These are two words that get mixed up so often that I have a shortcut for feedback (qmuc). Yes, they are different, and here's why.

Mucous is an adjective most often used to modify the noun membrane.

Mucus is a noun meaning the icky slimy gross stuff (if you had a brother like mine it was also known by snot and other, more disgusting names that I must stop thinking about before I ralph all over the keyboard) that is secreted by mucous membranes.

Also I am a moron who can't figure out how to make colored text on this blog. :(

My thanks to Common Errors in English Usage, a very useful site that you should bookmark immediately, because it explains said common errors in plain language, and also sometimes has little stealth puns that will sneak up on you.

Question of the day

Why is subject-verb agreement a closed book to so many people? Didn't everyone else have to learn how to diagram sentences in school to learn which verb went with which subject and therefore how to make them agree?

It drives me crazy.

Edit for the purpose of being more helpful than bitchy: If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the Purdue Online Writing Lab has a helpful page to help you with subject-verb agreement.

Use this page! PLEASE! Before what's left of my brain congeals into a solid mass of gelatinous-cube type material that makes everything it touches shrivel and die!

Edit 2 (Electric Boogaloo): This is standing in for the LYNXPLZ post I was supposed to make yesterday, except I was being possessed by the spirit of Donna Reed, so I wasn't on the computer. LOL.

Things That Are Not God, Part I

Oh, my children, the spelling/grammar checker is not god and you do not have to follow every freaking suggestion it makes.

When you type the plural of a word already in its dictionary, it will suggest you use an apostrophe. THIS IS WRONG.

It thinks you should put a comma before every single instance of "which." THIS IS WRONG.

Unless you've added them manually, it doesn't know what phrases like "in toto" and "Dalai Lama" mean. Until I added "en route" to my personal dictionaries, it always suggested "in root." NO.

Its thesaurus is puny and horrible and wrong. What it calls "synonyms" are responsible for a lot of the terribly bad usage in amateur fiction.

Context? What's that? It doesn't know if you're making a list, or typing in an office code. It ABSOLUTELY REFUSES to put cc: at the beginning of a line in lowercase. I can't tell you how many damn reports I get with Cc: at the bottom. Which makes me scream.

Please do not slavishly follow the recommendations of the spelling/grammar check in Word or any other platform. If you're truly in doubt, do something wild and LOOK IT UP so I can stop banging my head against the keyboard like some poor pseudoautistic freak.

Handy Search Tip

You know when you're searching for something on the internets and you get eleven million useless results because your search term is similar to something totally unrelated?

Say you have a job on a patient with schizophrenia and the Axis II diagnosis is "Cluster A trait, MMR." You're supposed to spell out MMR but you don't know what it is, so off you go to Google (at least I hope that's what you do) and search schizophrenia cluster a trait MMR. And you get a bunch of crap about the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella.

"IT CRAP!" you scream, and go shoot up the Luby's.

No, no, wait. Don't do that. There is a solution.

Your original search string is good, but if you add -vaccine to it, it will filter out all that crap about the MMR vaccine. Your full Google search string will be schizophrenia cluster a trait MMR -vaccine.

You still might have to wade through a bunch of scientific twaddle, but at least it won't contain anything about vaccines! Also, you can keep adding more minuses to filter out useless results as you find them.

Now your searches will be more efficient, your mind will be serene, and the people at the Luby's don't have to worry about getting shot. :D

LYNXPLZ

There is a rant coming up, but I had to stop writing it because it was putting me in a bad mood. And when I say a bad mood I mean I was getting to the point where all I could think of to say was “RAWR STUPID DUMB HATE HATE HATE HATE!”

Anyway, because it’s Saturday I want to share a useful link. My plan is to do this every Saturday, because I have a GINORMOUS link library and want to share.

Today’s link is OneLook. This is a dictionary search engine that will search over 9000 dictionaries for whatever word you’re looking for, including Dorland’s Online. It will also let you search for words containing whatever you’re looking for, like if you have a *mumblemumble* cyst, you can search for phrases containing cyst.

Recently they’ve added searches where you can find words related to certain concepts, and also acronyms. The instructions for doing so are all on the front page of the site, so I won’t repeat them here, but really, use this link. It is the best word finder on the internet as far as I’m concerned.

Now, it’s the weekend, so go eat some chocolate or something.