More than tomayto, tomahto

Unfortunately the misuse of words is usually more serious than just a pronunciation error. The casual abuse of scientific jargon especially does not sit well with me. I resent it when a lay person misapplies a word and then pooh poohs me when I correct them. I can site many examples right here in this blog.

One of the more egregious incidents involved the very serious error of not understanding the impact of carbon atom counts as it relates to common household appliances. My cigar smoking friend and I were discussing the fact that cigars traditionally were never lit with the old Zippo lighters because the fuel burned dirty; only wooden matches were used. But now he uses his propane lighter because it has a clean flame. I never heard of a propane lighter I stated.
He looked at me like I was from Mars. "You know, the ones refillable from a skinny can of propane."
"Oh, you mean butane", I corrected him.
"Propane, butane, same thing".
"No they are not the same thing" I indignantly countered back. "Propane has three carbon atoms and butane has four".
To this day I don't think he knows what I was talking about yet I am sure he feels I am the buffoon.

Another recent insult to my sensibilities involved the ecological sciences through a misunderstanding of the biological sciences. It is a well established phenomenon that there has been a world wide decline in the population and an increase in teratomatous anomalies of amphibians due to environmental toxins such as BPA. My acquaintance (another one) seemed to feel that snakes are particularly sensitive to this since they slither on their stomachs along the ground and are thus very "attuned to changes in mother earth". They would therefore be the first affected.
"I think it is really amphibians, not reptiles, that would be a more sensitive indicator of the health of an ecosystem. They have a more permeable integument and they also lay their eggs in the water, not on land, so water pollution affects them more", I gently explained. Just because snakes don't have legs doesn't make them more attuned to anything except their own creep factor. A cursory knowledge of eighth grade taxonomy might have spared her my lecture on the difference between amphibians and reptiles.
Sometimes I wonder why she doesn't call me any more.

And of course there is the daily assault on my composure when patients try to explain the location of the crack in their tooth. For this, though, they can be forgiven.
"It's on the top of the tooth", the patient will say thinking they are being quite helpful.
"What's the top?" I unfacetiously ask back. I truly do not know if they mean the biting surface or toward the gum. If it is an upper tooth they always mean the part of the tooth toward the palate as the top. But think about it; the root of the tooth is the portion in the palate and this is above the biting table of the tooth. We usually think of roots as being below tables so to speak. So on an upper tooth the bottom of the tooth is above the top of the tooth.

So you can see why I value precision in language. Using the correct word will avoid many misunderstandings and it most certainly will avoid a lecture by me.