More "T" words

Now that I have established Long's Rule # 1, in the previous essay, I will have to see how it applies as the words continue. I won't repeat the list from the previous essay; so let's just jump in. We begin with tampion, tarn, tarantism. Whoops, I just discovered that tampion, which is a wooden plug or cover for the muzzle of a gun or another kind of aperture, can also be spelled tompion and so I have learned a word for naught! Well, let's substitute tamoxifen for it. It is a near neighbor in the dicitonary, and has probably been longing for attention all these years anyway. It is an estrogen antagonist used to treat postmenopausal breast cancer. Here is a very useful page describing the drug from the National Cancer Institute. I bet if you attended that most inspiring of all foot races in America, the Susan B. Komen "Race for the Cure," you would find thousands of women who would know the word tamoxifen. The science of drugs is beginning to "grow" on me; someday I will have to take my time with it.

A tarn is a small steep-banked mountain lake. The Wikipedia article also calls it a corrie loch. The word is derived from the Old Norse, which very few people even named Ole know about. I picked this word because it was unfamiliar to me, but most people should be able to spell it correctly if they just "sound it out." Long's Second Rule of Spelling--when in doubt, sound it out. Tarantism is a dancing mania that broke out in medieval Italy. I suppose it was named for the city Taranto, where the outbreak occurred. But this issue is not so easily decided as all that. For example, we have the following from an online article.

"Tarantism is, allegedly, a deadly envenomation resulting from the bite of a kind of wolf spider called a "tarantula" (Lycosa tarentula). (These spiders are different from the broad class of spiders called "bird eating spiders" or "Tarantulas".) The condition was common in southern Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were strong suggestions that there is no organic cause for the heightened excitability and restlessness that gripped the victims. The stated belief of the time was that victims needed to engage in frenzied dancing to prevent death from tarantism. Supposedly a particular kind of dance, called the Tarantella, evolved from this therapy. Many people have suggested that the whole business was a deceit to evade religious proscriptions against dancing."

Thus, this explanation would relate it mostly to the bite of a spider rather than a location around Taranto. I think we need a social history of the movement/dance/sting in order to get this ironed out more precisely. But not now, and not by me.

Teasel, Teff, Telium, Teliospore

I bet we can move more quickly on these. Any plant biologist knows that a teasel is an "old world prickly herb." Pictures of it abound online. Teff is an annual Ethiopian cereal grass. I should have asked my benchmates at the Prefontaine classic if they knew what teff was. They were Ethiopians as far as I could tell, since they were dark-skinned, spoke in a language that sounded like Amharic (right, Bill) and cheered wildly for the Ethiopian runners. When we learn telium, we are also ushered into the presence of another tough word or two, for it means: "a teliospore-producing sorus or pustule on the host plant of a rust fungus." We just killed three words with one sentence, didn't we? Well, a sorus (pl. sori) is a cluster of sporangia (singular is sporangium) on the underside of a fertile fern frond. Say the last three words ten times quickly and you will be able to speak German without an accent! Well, you have to be a plant biologist or a student studying plants, or a person who loves plants and gardens but if you are, then these words will be trivially simple for you. A teliospore is defined in terms of a chlamydospore, but I am not going to get into all of this now. It is refreshing to know that when I go to bed tonight, there will be enough new things to keep me learning tomorrow...

Closing with Some Drug Terms

Well, we still have tons of terms to search out, but we are now entering the drug world. We already talked about tamoxifen, but now we have terazosin, temazepam, terbutaline and others. Let's begin. Whereas tamoxifen is primarily used by women in treating breast cancer, terazosin is used by men to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). It is in a class of medications called alpha blockers, and it relieves the symptoms of BPH by relaxing bladder and prostate muscles. As more of us men age and continue to live, medications for prostate cancers and BPH will, no doubt, multiply. Flomax, the drug usually prescribed for BPH, is tamsulosin, but this word didn't make it into the Collegiate, the Unabridged, or the OED. What is going on here? The central drug for treating millions of men, and it isn't even in the dictionary? There are more than 300,000 Google references to terazosin and around 274,000 to tamsulosin. Figure that one out.

Well, let me get off my high horse for a second and come down to temazepam. Whoops, I misread my list. This isn't in the Collegiate, but now that I have listed it, I might as well define it. It is a capsule used on a short-term basis to help you sleep through the night. However, this web page has a warning paragraph about it, so I don't want to be seen as promoting it. I am just interested in the words... Terbutaline does, however, occur in the Collegiate, and it refers to a "bronchodilator..used esp. in the form of its sulfate." I now understand that there is "considerable disagreement in the medical community about the use of terbutaline (known also as Brethine) as a preterm labor drug." Well, I don't have to face that issue in life, fortunately.

Conclusion

Because you have had to endure all these drug terms, I think it is only right to conclude with two words that are not medical terms: teppanyaki and terai. Derived from two Japanese words meaning "griddle" and "broiling," teppanyaki is a Japanese dish of meat, fish, or vegetables cooked on a large griddle. Not only does every Japanese person know this word, but anyone who has ever eaten in a Benihana restaurant (opened its first NY restaurant in 1964) or other Japanese steakhouses is familiar also with it. I am astonished with my ignorance of international cuisine. I think I need to visit a few more restaurants...

Finally, the word terai, which came into English in 1852 (spelled also Tura or Turyanee by the first person who brought it into English), is "the name of a belt of unhealthy marshy and jungly land, lying between the lower foothills of the Himalayas and the plains." Ah, I was looking up the subject of "terai jungle" and I came upon all kinds of web sites telling me about "wildlife jungle safaris," where one goes through the terai to see some of the best wildlife habitat in Asia. So, anyone who has ever been on such a safari or anyone in the business knows the word terai in his sleep. All this studying of words is starting to give me the wanderlust.

What other discipline in life, other than studying words, can bring you into so many completely different worlds so quickly? You can learn enough to taste all of these worlds, and begin to appreciate those who live in them all the time. Words open these worlds and may, as time goes on, draw me into several of them. I could get into it...

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