Medical slang is a form of slang used by doctors, nurses, paramedics and other hospital or medical staff. Its central aspect is the use of facetious but impressive-sounding acronyms and invented terminology to describe patients, co-workers or tricky situations. It serves, in other words, as a convenient if often gruesome code between medical professionals. Medical slang is to be found in numerous languages but in English, in particular, it has entered popular culture via television hospital/forensic dramas such as Casualty, Holby City, ER, House M.D., NCIS, Scrubs and Green Wing.
Read more about Medical Slang: Limitations On Use, Non-English, Annual Round-up of Medical Slang
Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or slang:
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)