strange use

[Victor Steinbok]

As stories pour out of Haiti on disaster relief, I've spotted two uses
of common words that seemed odd to me. By coincidence, both occur in
medical context.

Perhaps I am missing something, but, in my use, "fatal" means something
that necessarily causes death, not "can be lethal". To convey the latter
meaning, it would have to be "usually fatal" or "sometimes fatal"
(different degrees). The writer is a Canadian physician in Haiti.

http://bit.ly/8pJTYQ

> The woman had an abruption, where the placenta separates prematurely
> from the uterus and bleeding is extraordinary. *It’s fatal*, can be
> lethal to the mother and to the baby.

I would read this as implying that the injury has the potential of
killing both the mother and the fetus, but the initial impulse of the
writer was to say that it is certain to kill the mother. But reading
further makes it clear that, although both patients died, there is
absolutely no reason to have foreseen this as a certainty.

Another strange use appears more than once. (Also in other news
stories--just do a search for "anesthesia and Haiti" or for "run out of
anesthesia".)

http://bit.ly/55RNjo
> There were unconfirmed reports floating around this week that Cuban
> doctors providing aid in Haiti had *run out of anesthesia* and that
> the U.S. embargo of Cuba prevented the U.S. military from replenishing
> their supplies.

Presumably, "run out of anesthesia" means that there is insufficient
supply of anesthetics, chemical agents. I am used to "anesthesia" as
induced loss of sensitivity or consciousness, i.e., a state or a process
of getting into that state. But I am not familiar with the use where
"anesthesia" means the chemical agent that puts one into that state.
(And I have an anesthesiologist in the family.) The usual reference to
the agent is as an "anesthetic". Perhaps I am behind the curve on this
one--there are 36G+ raw ghits for "run out of anesthesia".

VS-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org