- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
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(I can't find the old WOTD thread, but if it's still around, please merge this.)
Weird Words: Gossypiboma
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A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary
from cover to cover and wrote about it in his book Reading the OED,
commented on this word in a piece on the OUPBlog. He had been told
about it by a surgeon, who called it "a memento that we surgeons
sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in
some poor patient's abdomen."
It's worrying that the condition happens often enough that surgeons
have found it necessary to create a word for it (it's fairly common
in specialist articles and books). It's even more worrying that two
other terms exist to describe cotton or synthetic fibre gauze left
in error in a patient: "textiloma" and "cottonoid".
In both subject and appearance, "gossypiboma" surely fits anybody's
definition of a weird word. Its strange look comes from its being
an amalgam of words from two languages: Latin "gossypium", cotton,
and Swahili "boma", a place of concealment. This leads - surely not
by accident - to a word seeming to contain the ending "-oma" that
denotes a tumour or other abnormal growth (as in carcinoma or
lymphoma), since such growths can develop around alien material
left in the body.
"Gossypiboma" was said in a book on surgery in 2004 to have been
coined in an article of 1994 by A M Patel and others. They may well
have done so, since I've not found an earlier example.
I've no idea how surgeons say it [Julane Marx suggests "malpractice
lawsuit"] but with luck one will be able to tell me.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/qpda.htm
Weird Words: Gossypiboma
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary
from cover to cover and wrote about it in his book Reading the OED,
commented on this word in a piece on the OUPBlog. He had been told
about it by a surgeon, who called it "a memento that we surgeons
sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in
some poor patient's abdomen."
It's worrying that the condition happens often enough that surgeons
have found it necessary to create a word for it (it's fairly common
in specialist articles and books). It's even more worrying that two
other terms exist to describe cotton or synthetic fibre gauze left
in error in a patient: "textiloma" and "cottonoid".
In both subject and appearance, "gossypiboma" surely fits anybody's
definition of a weird word. Its strange look comes from its being
an amalgam of words from two languages: Latin "gossypium", cotton,
and Swahili "boma", a place of concealment. This leads - surely not
by accident - to a word seeming to contain the ending "-oma" that
denotes a tumour or other abnormal growth (as in carcinoma or
lymphoma), since such growths can develop around alien material
left in the body.
"Gossypiboma" was said in a book on surgery in 2004 to have been
coined in an article of 1994 by A M Patel and others. They may well
have done so, since I've not found an earlier example.
I've no idea how surgeons say it [Julane Marx suggests "malpractice
lawsuit"] but with luck one will be able to tell me.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/qpda.htm