Why medical terms are so freaking hard to pronounce?

[SSSnail]

I mean, why the hell are they so hard to pronounce. If you have a disease, you can die from just trying to pronounce it. It's not like you can read whatever the doctors are writing anyways, why, WHY?

 

[Xylitol]

pneumonia

 

[Saint Michael]

Greek.

 

[Random Variable]

vagina

 

[RapidSnail]

AIDS

 

[jagec]

They're not hard to pronounce, they're just long and unfamiliar, because many of them are conjugate words whose components are borrowed from Greek or Latin.

The medical profession needs to be very specific when discussing diseases. Otherwise you might run into the problem of coming down with "the French disease" while in France, where all the doctors will want to treat you for "the Italian disease", or ship you off to Russia and treat you for "the Polish disease".

Or, y'know, they could just treat you for syphilis.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: SSSnail
If you have a disease, you can die from just trying to pronounce it.

 

[IEC]

Varicella zoster = virus that causes chicken pox.

Not fun to have as an adult, trust me.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: Spartan Niner
Not fun to have as an adult, trust me.

I've been there

Fucking vaccine didn't do squat.

 

[gnumantsc]

It's to make you sound smarter than the ppl out there who are not doctors?

 

[Throckmorton]

Usually Greek names are used because Greek is a language that allows joining words together to form compound words.
It also acts as a lingua franca. If French fries had some Greek name, they wouldn't have been renamed when we hated the French. You can see how different countries would want to use their own names because of pride or animosity, but Greek is universal because all of our Western cultures are descended from Greece.

 

[moshquerade]

what words? most of them just end in "itis".

 

[destrekor]

Russian words are hard to pronounce. But I've never really struggled with medical words, and I'm not in the medical field.

+

 

[Juno]

ikariam

 

[DaWhim]

Originally posted by: moshquerade
what words? most of them just end in "itis".

-itis means inflammatory, iirc.

 

[imported_Lothar]

They're not that hard to pronounce.