One thing I learned after having pneumonia: medical and chemical terms are long.
Pneumonia. Costochondritis. Teva-Salbutamol. Apo-Fluticasone. Auro-moxifloxacin. These are some terms I’ve become familiar with, unfortunately, over the two-week period I’ve had pneumonia. Costochondritis, I feel that I owe an explanation, is an inflammation of the upper ribs that causes pain but is typically not serious. Salbutamol and fluticasone, which I took as inhalers, are bronchodilators (that widen the airways) and corticosteroids (more anti-inflammation) respectively. Moxifloxacin is a strong antibiotic that I was prescribed, often used to treat bacterial infections. What was the longest word in the world that I furiously memorized in middle school to appear knowledgeable? Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Also a lung disease, but unlike pneumonia, caused specifically by inhaling volcano dust. (It’s not actually used for diagnosis, but was coined just for the sake of being the longest word in the dictionary.) And I recall, with my limited knowledge of chemistry, that even this eighteen-syllable word was nothing compared to what they come up with daily in the chemical field. Each time new chemicals are discovered they keep adding prefixes like hexa- or hydroxy- onto them, and in the world of chemistry (and also German), apparently, they can go on forever. As long as they describe the chemical accurately—no limits. My biology teacher once showed us the name of a protein that went on for forty-two pages. Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminyl…and on and on and on. The protein is a titin, found in muscle.
In the chemical field, I guess, words are strictly functional. They don’t have to be beautiful-sounding or readily pronounceable, but they do need to be medically correct. So they layer on the necessary prefixes to create the most accurate description of a compound, condition, or drug. My mother who studied pharmaceutical science was unfazed by the label “PrApo-Fluticasone” on my inhaler while I was mildly panicking. But shouldn’t I as an English student been the one most at home with long words? We’re weak, I guess, always nicely ankle-deep in expressive literary words that remain under five or six syllables, since they need to be infused with denotations and connotations. I recall at this point the phobia of long words (hippopotomonstroses-quippedaliophobia. Irony doesn’t begin to explain this one.) and how if that’s a real thing, most of its victims are probably English majors, since we’re the ones who actually have nightmares of Shakespeare and Faulkner. We’re often haunted by writing that we fail to interpret, whereas for pharmaceutical students, page-long words are everyday occurrences, just an extra-annoying drug to put on a prescription. People like us (writers) are the sensitive ones swept off our feet when a wall of medical words hits us like a wave. That’s not a word, we wail. That’s a whole paragraph! A whole sentence—and a run-on one too!
It’s funny how any of Homer’s epics, or the notorious The Sound and the Fury, or all of the Joycean wordplay found throughout Ulysses couldn’t rival methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminyl…isoleucine in its indecipherability. Obviously, the books I mentioned are human at the core—and this protein isn’t. But if a non-English-speaking alien were given a page of each to examine, they might choose the latter as seemingly more high literature. Based on appearance they might classify the protein as “the work of a very angsty poet, with an extensive thesaurus at hand.” Or “a monologue written by an ambitious, avant-garde playwright.” As English speakers we know that the protein means nothing but the protein itself, its uniqueness of meaning ensured by the scientists by having included all the amino acids that make up the protein, but as soon as we start assigning connotations and double meanings to chemical prefixes—oh the solid wall of classifications will coming crashing down, in a cascade of ambiguities and innuendoes. Perhaps it’s just as well we (English majors) stay away from naming chemicals.
