Meteorological metaphors are common in everyday speech: he was lightning fast; you are my sunshine; it’s clear skies from now on. That doesn’t make them common in medical writing, and nor are they easy to search. Most of the clear skies are literal, in articles about climate change, the ozone layer, and bird migration among others. But […]
Spectrum originally meant the same as spectre: a ghost. It was appropriated by Newton in 1671 to describe how sunlight passing through a prism “exhibited… a Spectrum of divers colours” (OED). The modern definition is “The entire range of wavelengths (or frequencies) of electromagnetic radiation [or] any one part of this larger range” (OED). Among […]
In the column about icebergs (qv), I mentioned repertoire used instead of number: “expanding repertoire of targets for immune inhibition in bladder cancer”. Repertoire and repertory are two similar words connected with the performing arts. Repertoire—which is (COD) the body of pieces known or regularly performed by an artist or company—is the commoner in PubMed®; […]
Metaphor Watch kicked off (a metaphor for started) with epidemic, used ubiquitously and inappropriately for the non-communicable diseases of industrialized nations. I rounded off (a metaphor for finished) with a quote that wins a prize for tautologous exaggeration, that “the world is heading for a vascular tsunami of pandemic proportions.” From this, I want to […]
When I equated the quantum leap to the big bang, I overlooked another term borrowed from another science: tectonic shift. The adjective tectonic is older than modern geology; it comes from the Greek, meaning pertaining to building or construction in general (OED). We are familiar with it for its application to the tectonic plates underlying […]
An iceberg is a useful metaphor. It appears most commonly as the tip of the iceberg, and it is a warning. Nine-tenths of an iceberg is under water, usually extending well beyond the area of the visible tip. Before radar, they were a terrible shipping hazard. The proper use of the metaphor, therefore, is as a […]
Baseball provides many metaphors, but not many have made it to PubMed. A ballpark is a baseball ground. Figuratively, it is a noun meaning a particular area or range, or an adjective meaning approximate. In the OED, the first recorded use of ballpark to mean the stadium was 1899, and its meaning of approximate was […]
Impact is not an old word, unlike its close relative effect. The OED credits Chaucer with the first use of effect, at the end of the 14th century. Impact is four centuries later, and is a particular type of effect: a physical one. The first uses of impact were in the field of dynamics, in […]
Last ditch, last minute, eleventh hour: all expressions allowing a relieved sigh. There are no single, non-metaphorical words to replace them. Ultimate, late and final appear in lists of synonyms, but they don’t give the sense. Last minute and eleventh hour are synonymous: something done before time has run out. Last minute has always been […]
There are a lot of elephants in a lot of rooms these days. The popularity of an elephant in the room in general English has increased ten-fold since the early 1980s. It is a forceful metaphor for something everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about. It makes a good, eye-catching, title for […]