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Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009placebo and, er, "nocebo"? No credibility...
I hadn't heard of it officially until to day but it seems the proper medical antonym of placebo is "nocebo". I haven't looked in a dictionary or grimoire of any kind, or thesaurus, but apparently this shoody forgery of a phrase was coined in the '60s in, of all places, the USA. Perhaps I'm missing something etymologically but isn't "altercation" a good general antonym for "placation". And equally as intuitive in its meaning, if not more so, would be "altercebo" to signify an inert base which appears to have unwanted effects in test group patients? I don't know. If medicine can't be logical then what can? I'm now having very grave second thoughts about sending the BMJ paper on how to make the best kinds of flies from chesse which drain the phlegmatic humours from the coronary organ without gorging themselves on the blood which it also helps circulate to the cooling organ of the brain which in turn allows the spleen and stomach to get on with their allotted functions of thinking as I am now no longer as happy as I was that any review would be competent or indeed at all logical. "nocebo" indeed? Whose idea was that sad portman toe of an expression jamming the doors of the elevator of rational progress? "altercebo" is if anything etymologically AND intuitively more accurate. G DAEB COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 SIPSTON -- sipston_777@my-deja.com filted: >I hadn't heard of it officially until to day but it >seems the proper medical antonym of placebo [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] >to signify an inert base which appears to have >unwanted effects in test group patients? Where "placebo" is the Latin word for "I will please", "nocebo" is the Latin word for "I will harm"....r  SignatureA pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optometrist asks whether you see the glass more full like this?...or like this? > I hadn't heard of it officially until to day but it > seems the proper medical antonym of placebo [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > Perhaps I'm missing something etymologically I think so. The OED derives it from Lating "nocêbô" (I shall cause harm), 1st sg fut indic of "nocêre" (to harm). This is exactly parallel to the etymology of "placebo" from "placêre" (to please). [Pretend that the circumflexes above were macrons, which Latin-1 doesn't have.] SignatureEvan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |People think it must be fun to be a 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |super genius, but they don't Palo Alto, CA 94304 |realize how hard it is to put up |with all the idiots in the world. kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com | Calvin (650)857-7572 http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ > Perhaps I'm missing something etymologically > but isn't "altercation" a good general antonym > for "placation"? You may have misunderstood antonyms and how they occur in the language. 1. The core idea is that antonyms are a pair of words with opposite or opposed meanings. ("General antonym" is not a phrase linguists actually use differently from "antonym.") 2. Many words have no antonym: words like GREEN and MEDIUM are real, and many words mean NOT GREEN or NOT MEDIUM but this does not mean any of them completes a pair of antonyms. GREEN and BLUE are different but are not antonyms. 3. We have no reason thus to suppose that any word ABC has an antonym DEF. Some do and others do not. This is an empirical fact that we may observe or count: but it does no manifest some invisible logical force shaping the language. SignatureDon Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) On May 14, 8:13 pm, sipston_...@my-deja.com wrote: > I'm now having very grave second thoughts > about sending the BMJ paper on how to make the [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > no longer as happy as I was that any review > would be competent or indeed at all logical. This sentence boils my brains, though I must admit it humours my spleen. Jim Deutch (JimboCat) -- "Professor Grinspoon and actually many others as having a much better grasp of the laws of physics and thereby of having an open mindset upon planetology and of the sorts of harsh environment capable forms of other life that could be possible, as typically these folks having less often if ever having been formally published, haven't actually verbatim excluded the possibility of there having been other life on Venus, though much less having bothered as to exclude upon intelligent ETs as making a go of it at their coexisting efforts." -- Brad Guth > On May 14, 8:13 pm, sipston_...@my-deja.com wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > This sentence boils my brains, though I must admit it humours my > spleen. There are people who think mainly with their spleen. -- Jerry Friedman >> On May 14, 8:13 pm, sipston_...@my-deja.com wrote: >> [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > > There are people who think mainly with their spleen. A woman I know announced, the week before last, that she'd been told that it had been discovered that all fatal illnesses are caused by an unconscious death-wish on the part of the spleen. I don't think she noticed the unconscious behaviour of my eyebrows, other than which I restrained myself. Oh, and a better opposite of "placebo" would be "displicebo". There must be conditions in which it would have some therapeutic value. SignatureMike. > There are people who think mainly with their spleen. It's a Parisian problem. SignatureAnd remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are. [Rufus T. Firefly] |
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