second thoughts on Nkinis

[Mark A. Mandel]

Jim Landau writes:
   >>>>>

an ADS-L member, who I will not cite by name, was I understand once
suffering chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins's lymphoma.  Said member wrote:

>(who in fact coward 1/3 of the way out of his own 4th B cycle a
>couple of years ago)

Forsooth!  Dr. non-Hodgkins will be ashamed of you!
 <<<<<

If you are scolding our colleague for backing out of medical treatment that
(so far as I know) neither you nor I have had to endure, I have nothing to
say. If you are commenting on the use of "coward" as a past tense verb, I
second the motion. If you're complaining about the spelling of the name, I
also agree, although that's an understandable confusion and IMHO quite
excusable: the correct "Hodgkin" is much less common than "Hodgkins".

But if you dislike the negated eponym, you're out of luck; it is standard
medical terminology. See the American Cancer Society's page on it

(http://www.cancer.org/docroot/cri/content/cri_2_4_1x_what_is_non_hodgkins_lymphoma_32.asp),

and my instructions to the annotators who work for me in the project on
information extraction from the biomedical literature for which I am
research administrator

(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mamandel/annotators/onco/definitions.html#malig-type;
in the bulleted list, under "eponymy").

Mark A. Mandel, Research Administrator
Biomedical Information Extraction, Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]