Nouns

Devolution of “prescription drug”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I was waiting in a pharmacy line the other day when I started thinking about the devolution of the phrase “prescription drug”.

Americans used to go to pharmacies to pick up “prescription drugs”.

But it is rare to hear any of them say that phrase today.

Now we call these drugs simply “prescriptions”.

But a “prescription” is what a doctor writes or makes.

So it must sound odd to many non-Americans to hear an American telling a pharmacist that he or she wants “to pick up my prescription”, when what the person actually wants to do is to pick up the drug, not what the doctor wrote.

The truncation, if you will, of the phrase “prescription drug” into the noun “prescription” is only the first step in the phrase’s devolution.

The second step comes in many American hospitals.

I was telling my brother, who has been an operating-room technician, about this devolution, and he said that many American hospital employees do not even call the drug a “prescription”.

No, they refer to such a drug by the noun “script” — the six letters in the middle of the noun “prescription”.

So there you have it: “prescription drug” devolved to “prescription”, which devolved to “script”.

I wonder what is next — a “scri”?

“bedroom suit”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I have heard this phrase a lot.

Problem:
It is not a “suit”!

Explanation:
What the heck is a “bedroom suit”?

For that matter, what is a “living-room suit” or a “dining-room suit”?

Okay, I am kidding.

I know what these phrases mean.

I know what the people who say or write them are doing.

They are mispronouncing or misspelling the noun that means a furniture set, most particularly the set of furniture necessary to furnish one room.

That noun is “suite” — NOT “suit”! Talk about NOT Hooked on Phonics.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “bedroom suit” — 9,980,000 matches
  • “bedroom suite” — 9,520,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the incorrect noun over the correct noun by a ratio of 1.05-to-1, which is horrible!

I believe that the favoring of “bedroom suit” over “bedroom suite” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to write and pronounce the four-letter, one-syllable “suit” than it is to write and pronounce the five-letter, 1.5-syllable “suite”.

Solution:
“bedroom suite”

“gander”

Nouns

The noun “gander” is often heard in sentences such as “I’ll take a gander at it.”

I wondered about this use of the noun, so I checked a dictionary.

The primary meaning of “gander” is male of any goose species.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the slang use of “gander” to mean glance comes from the image of someone taking a long look, as if craning his or her neck like a goose (or sex-specifically a gander).

Apparently this slang use of “gander” was first recorded in 1887.

I then wondered why “gander” instead of “goose” — which specifically refers to the female of any goose species — became popular as the slang form of the noun “glance”, so I did some more research.

Apparently “I’ll take a goose at it.” did not have a chance because seven years earlier — in 1880 — the slang use of “goose” as a poke between the buttocks to startle first appeared.

Conclusion: Be sure you know your “goose” from your “gander” when using these words in slang!