the list of 9 for march 7, 2009:
NINE OUTDATED MEDICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS
My wife and I were recently discussing once-common words that have since fallen out of fashion.For instance, in the 1960s everybody referred to marijuana as "grass." No longer. Today it'scalled a million things, but never grass. Similarly, nobody seems to call a condom a"rubber" anymore. Of course this is just street slang, and most slang changes by the decade, ifnot by the year. However, we noticed a lot of terms from the world of physical and psychologicalmedicine that, for various reasons, have become obsolete. Although many of the older terms arestill used technically by professionals, I'm focusing on general layman's usage in this list.
- RHEUMATISM. A generic term no doctor uses anymore. What itusually referred to is today called rheumatoid arthritis.
- ANAL RETENTIVE. This Freudian term for extremeneat-freakism has since been replaced by "obsessive compulsive," though psychologists mark astrong difference between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Obsessive CompulsivePersonality Disorder, the latter being their true equivalent of "anal retentive."
- TRANQUILIZER. Up until the 1980s, "tranquilizer" was theword used to refer to a variety of antianxiety drugs, but usually Valium. Today even Valium hastaken a back seat to trendy brand names such as Xanax, Ativan and so forth. We don't call them"tranquilizers." Those are what you inject into wild animals. If we must use something other thana brand name, the generic word "meds" gets tossed around a lot.
- LOCKJAW. The word "tetanus" has always been part of ourvocabulary. Every child needs to get his tetanus shot, because that rusty nail is out theresomewhere. But even when I was a kid, the disease was colorfully referred to as "lockjaw," which Inever hear these days.
- NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. "Nervousness" was commonly cited bydoctors of yesteryear to describe what we now call anxiety. And "nervous breakdowns" were thethings that sent your poor old Uncle Charlie to the "sanitarium," not rehabilitation center, for"treatment," not therapy. Professionals refer to it now as a mental breakdown, but the man on thestreet will more often use the slight misnomer "panic attack," a somewhat recent term.
- MANIC DEPRESSIVE. Today's bipolar.
- SENILITY. Once accepted as just a part of aging,"senility" was not seen as any sort of disease. In fact, when Alzheimer's was firstdiscovered a century ago, it was originally called "presenile dementia," meaning you were losingyour memory earlier than you were naturally meant to. "Senility" is a socially incorrect wordto use now, and so it has been wholly replaced by Alzheimer's.
- GRIPPE. We head back to great-grandpa's day for this one.You'll find it all the time in books from the 1800s, right up there with things like consumption(tuberculosis) or dropsy (congestive heart failure). What we once called the "grippe" we now callthe flu. The French still say grippe.
- ADD. It's ironic that the relatively new acronym "ADD,"Attention Deficit Disorder, should be replaced in common parlance so quickly with ADHD,Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. We couldn't sit still long enough for ADD! Doctors makeit clear that these are two very different behaviors. But your spazzy friends who were once quickto cite ADD as an excuse for their flakiness were even quicker to rediagnose themselves as havingADHD. What's next? ADHHDDH?
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