Abbreviation of a word or phrase to a letter or two is the most extreme form of breakage that it can undergo. The process has variants: initialisms, contractions, and acronyms. […]
Columnists
The BMJ Today: Patient centred outcomes research
• A research paper looks at the association between warfarin treatment and longitudinal outcomes after ischaemic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation in community practice, using a large registry of patients […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Backslang
Back-formation , forming words by shortening other words, should not be confused with backslang, the formation of words, not by breaking them up, but simply by reversing them. A yob […]
Richard Smith: Science and journalism threatened in the high court
I wrote this piece some six weeks ago after giving evidence in a libel case reported by The BMJ and published on 30 July 2015 . I’ve had to wait […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Literally a metaphor
We use metaphor, a figure of speech, to explain or enliven: in doing so we write metaphorically, or figuratively. The opposite of metaphorically is literally. We don’t need to add […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Back breaking
Words typically develop from a root of some sort, and derivatives are formed from a primary word by changing or adding something. You can do this in many ways. You […]
William Cayley: Ethics and professional wisdom
The recently publicized news that the American Psychological Association (APA) “colluded” with US governmental agencies to create ethical guidelines permitting psychologists to participate in “harsh interrogations” of military detainees is appalling. […]
Billy Boland: Time for a new definition of quality?
I’ve been troubled by our modern concepts of quality in healthcare recently. In these austere times, we are all taking a harder look at the care we deliver and are […]
Richard Smith: Making patient data available—the risks are easy to understand, the benefits opaque
“We seem to spend all our time talking about the downside of making patient data available and little about the upside,” said a frustrated researcher at last week’s Sowerby eHealth […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worst
There are other ways of breaking words besides the ones we have so far dealt with: metanalysis, aphaeresis, aphesis, and apocope. Take, for example, ellipsis (Greek ἔλλειψις), which means coming short. […]