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MEDICAL BUZZWORDS CAN BE FUN
BUT THEY DON’T DO MUCH GOOD
By Dylan Chadwick, Staff Writer for Physicians Office Resource
There’s an increasingly circulated anecdote (usually among
graphic designers) about a big time representative from a
big time tech company meeting before a middle school Perhaps the anecdote is exaggerated (aren't they all?), but
the intended principle rings relevant: words need context to
be fully understood. Consider the mind-blowing fact that
class. He asks the students, presumably born in the early
2000s, if they know what a floppy disk is. He's met with this anecdote actually reveals: for the last 18 years, floppy
disks have only really existed as skeuomorphic (a fancy term
silence. Then, he produces a floppy disk from his sport coat
pocket and shows it to them. “This is a floppy disk,” he says,
turning it over in his hands to show them. “Now, have any for "making digital items resemble their real-world
counterparts") “save” graphics on our computers and
mobile apps, and children born after 2000 are extremely
of you seen one of these before?” After a few more beats of
silence, a child raises her hand to say that she recognizes unlikely to have ever seen one "in the wild."
the object as the icon she clicks on to save her progress on
Microsoft office. A few seconds later, another child raises his
hand because he’s seen it on his Angry Birds game. A wave On Creating Buzzwords
of recognition floods the classroom as the children place a
function and a purpose to a tangible object they’re
encountering for the very first time.
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These divides in comprehension crisscross every facet of
culture and industry as our old processes continually blur
into neutralizing digital futures, and medicine is no
exception. Consider a medical buzzword construction like
“Orphan Annie Eyes,” a phrase which describes the cells
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