As you know I’m a writer (and an actor and an artist but that’s neither here nor there for the moment). As such I notice when words get used incorrectly or things could have been phrased better.

It started early this week on the CBC. They were talking about the investigation into the Lac-Mégantic railroad crash last summer. In case you don’t remember, this was when a parked train mostly made up of tank cars full of oil from North Dakota, broke loose, ran a couple kilometres downhill, derailed and exploded in the centre of the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Forty some people were killed and most of the downtown was burned to the ground. The investigation has centred on train safety and old tanker cars. Another question they are looking at though is why the oil exploded and burned so readily. Remember that much of the oil they haul up here is from the Alberta Tar Sands. (Yes, it is Tar Sands. We were talking about the Tar Sands in the 1970s and early 1980s when I was in college. Oil Sands is a marketing term they came up with in the late 1990s to make it sound more palatable.) As such it is really hard to ignite. It’s not very flammable. It turns out that the North Dakota oil is much lighter and is not cut with other compounds to make it flow better through pipes like Tar Sands oil is. As such it is much more flammable. Yes, I said flammable because that’s the correct word.

On the CBC they discussed this on several programs but they kept using the word Volatile. They kept saying things like “The North Dakota crude exploded because it is more Volatile than most other crude oils”. The trouble is that Volatile means easily evaporated. I remember this because I got it wrong on a test in freshman chemistry in high school. All week I would cringe whenever they would bring up the Lac-Mégantic accident. I knew they would get it wrong. The oil’s volatility might have had something to do with the severity of the fire but it wasn’t the primary cause. Water is a volatile substance too, it is not however a Flammable substance. This would have been just a minor annoyance except that multiple hosts and multiple “experts” on different programs throughout the week kept using the word wrong.

For a person who works with language as much as I do this got to be very annoying.

But it wasn’t the only time this week when language was used poorly. On Wednesday I saw the doctor prior to the start of Chemo Cycle 5. I mentioned that a friend of mine had been treated for Lymphoma a year before and though they had him scheduled for eight to ten cycles of Chemo they stopped it after five. He was told that it looked like they had gotten it all. I wanted to know how they were monitoring my case and if we might be knocking off a cycle or two if things looked good. The doctor said that with Lymphoma they can measure how much of it was still around and see when it’s all gone. With mine, they can’t and just know from experience and statistics that eight cycles will take care of it in almost all of the cases. He could have stopped there but no, he continued on and this is where he got into trouble. He added, “But don’t worry, only fourteen percent of patients benefit from Chemo anyway".

Then there was a long pause on the conversation.

I then asked him what that meant. Mind you I was screaming inside but I kept my cool. The Doctor then went on to explain that there’s a tiny portion, just a few percent that surgery and chemo did not help. It resists all treatments. Inside the screaming got louder but I said nothing. Finally he finished with “But the vast majority are cured by the surgery alone. They don’t need chemo but we don’t know who’s in that group so we give it to everyone after the operation.” Marsha and I did a bit of math and figured that meant that around 80% of patients are cured by the surgery. Add to that another 14% where surgery plus chemo clear it up, meaning that 94% of cases are cured. This sounded much better than the 14% figure, and that was when the internal screaming stopped.

It would have been much better if he’d led with the 94%.

So the moral of the story is that even good news, has to be put the right way. Even good news can sound bad if you don’t present it correctly. Knowing the meaning of words and how they will be interpreted by the listener makes all the difference. As my dad told me years ago, language is a tool. Just like any other tool, you need to know how to use language correctly. Mind you he was talking about profanity and expletives. But his point was well made. Even obscenities can be correct in the right context. On the other hand using volatile when you mean flammable or explosive is not. Just as you wouldn’t use a hammer to drive in screws, you need what is the correct linguistic tool to use in each situation. I don’t claim to be perfect, I tend to write in vernacular a lot of the time but at least I try to use the correct word. That is except of course when autocorrect substitutes something completely broomfondle.

So much for this weeks soap box.

To make up for this little rant here's something I ran across this week. If any of you need to deal with engineers, or for that matter anyone that uses a lot of jargon, like IT Techs, or Doctors, you may get a kick out of this. I first ran across this piece in the late '70s in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. More recently somebody expanded it as a Chrysler Technical Video and did a really good job. The important thing to remember is that while most of the words are real they are used in a nonsensical fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4