It sure has been a while since my last attempt at penning something down here. While it's always an amusing struggle to procure creativity and let loose in this space, today's post has required me mustering oodles of courage to finally commemorate the distant existence of school work that I should have been perhaps working on throughout summer. I have fortunately been graced by a mid-summer epiphany and thus I have decided to prevail over the infamous, "Better late than never."
Moving on to the focal point of this blogpost—
As a part of the Lang and Lit course, we explored a plentitude of literary facets that collectively accessorize the English language, with the relatively recent emergence of Text Speak being one of the very first conceptual understandings that we delved into. Text Speak itself is considered to be the brain child of the digital generation. With smartphones, instant messaging, and social media domineering the human populace (and to a great extent, also destabilizing our sanity), Text Speak per se was begotten.
lol, rofl, ily, imy and so many more ostensible emotions ransacked into little bundles of contractions that would have never made any sense about a decade or two ago, have become commonplace in the colloquial phase of English today. Now, like many, since time immemorial, I also accused the digital age to have been the force behind the birth of this pillaged derivation of Queen's English. But, my recent encounter with the medical realm has provoked me to consider otherwise.
Over the summer, I have had the incredible opportunity to have interned as a research assistant at one of the most renowned hospitals in Canada. While the tag sure sounds appealing as it is, the extensive demands of the job title are equally draining. Nevertheless, one of the most intriguing elements associated with the internship, is the opportunity to be trained on the medical database of the hospital and be familiarized with the intricacies of the jargon that buttress the system.
Contusions, lacerations, hyperlipidemia, anticoagulants, and antiplatelets are only a few of the vast medical terminology glossary that have managed to etch themselves in my memory. And to top it all off, as if these esoteric terms were not enough, I also had to become acquainted with medical contractions. Yes, I repeat, MEDICAL CONTRACTIONS.
Who would have known that Text Speak has also infiltrated the medical realm? Well, at least that was my first thought on my primary encounter with these abbreviations.
Dx, Hx, x, SPC, LOC, HI
The ones above are really only a few to mention. Health care professionals are oft required to relate clinical occurrences in the form of detailed patient reports. And with the excessive amount of typing they have to do, I believe these abbreviations serve as essential stress-relievers from having to ceaselessly type out technical jargon. Clearly, the purpose of medical contractions differs immensely from that of what Text Speak happens to offer. But if we break it down to the fundamentals, the constituent intents seem to be the same: convenience. We know the medical field to be decorated with its own jargon, and so perhaps this concept already existed in the medical realm prior to the proliferation of Text Speak? Maybe it was in fact a neurologist that spurted Text Speak? Or even a bored thrombosis physician?
I guess we'll never know. But it certainly is interesting to ponder over.
Either ways, it was enlightening for me to have become familiar with what I would term as jargonistic hybrids: jargon disguised as Text Speak. And in all honesty, what was even more enlightening was the fact that Lang and Lit has urged me to consider relatively simplistic miscellanies with a magnified literary lens. Never would I have thought that I was able enough to conjure such abstract connections and come up with ideologies like that of a jargonistic hybrid.
Until next time!
DSC @ 14:12
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