Molto Agitato

Words are important to me. It’s part of my love of communication, mostly magnified by my ever-increasing commitment to writing. Writing and editing have demonstrated up-close and personal how crucial the right word is, and how words have the power to convey certain feelings, carry with them an aura of mood that is more precise than the definition ever could be. I know that’s why I’ve become hyper-sensitive to the way they’re used when communication is most important, and why I feel cheated when an accepted usage having nothing to do with the word’s actual impression forces itself on me. I can sense I might be losing you, but maybe if you allow your mind a bit of wiggle room you’ll see what I mean.

I used to shake my head over the real estate terms that showed up most often in marketing materials intended as enhancements to the sales process. As my experience in real estate brokerage continued over 20 plus years, I found a way to laugh over the drained, lifeless phrases that were not only meaningless but downright misleading. A ‘view of the Park’ more often described a sliver of green glimpsed in mirrors strategically places along the sides of the apartment’s windows, or if the potential buyer hung out the casement craning his neck at a 45° angle while the broker anchored his legs to keep him from plunging to his death. ‘Estate condition’ meant uninhabitable, while ‘good original condition’ meant almost uninhabitable. I knew the marketing phrases had become accepted jargon that everyone, including the buyers, had come to understand. But it seemed to me we could do better, and in fact create more excitement if we painted a picture of the property with words that described its character as well as what it looked like.

At much the same time, I’d started noting the popular verbiage of the fitness industry in New York because I’d spent some time being certified as a trainer, and so had a heightened awareness of the naïvely ignorant and/or purposely misleading jargon specific to that fast-expanding business culture. At one point, before I’d started writing a blog and possibly before there were any blogs to write or read at all, I considered keeping a log of the phrases overheard in a certain media-hyped gym I considered the worst offender. ‘Warming up’ certainly referred to the raising of one’s core temperature in order to increase blood flow to the extremities and protect muscle fiber as it began to be called on for work. But in that particular gym, I heard trainers disparage the need to warm up since the temperature outside had already reached 70°. There were many other frightening examples of tortured verbosity in that place, but one of my favorites came from the owner who told a perspective client when she inquired about the level of certification he required of his trainers, that he didn’t believe in certification—he thought the trainer’s accreditation should come from the heart. I can remember being as worried about his insurance coverage as I was for the potential client.

And so now that I’m writing with a full-time commitment instead of selling coop apartments or training people’s muscles to grow, what do I find gives me the greatest pause for thought when I read, see or hear a strained phrase or word used in a way that distorts its true sensibility and yet is totally accepted by the culture that tortures it? Oddly enough (or perhaps not) they don’t come from other writers. They come from everyday life that might in fact become part of something I’m writing.  At this moment I’m focused on the strange language of hospitals since I’ve spent a lot of time in one with a family member, and specifically in the department of neurology where the language is as particular and strange as it is in real estate or physical fitness. And here, more than almost anywhere I’ve studied the distortion of language, I find myself most confused by the acceptance of a vocabulary that’s not only off the direct dictionary interpretation of a word, but gratingly separated from the feeling it’s meant to convey. I hear certain words repeated by the medical profession over time and feel myself getting more and more agitated without knowing why; or at least that was so before I sat down to explore and write this. I hear you saying very few of us truly understand medical terms if they’re not part of our daily lives or work, but that’s not what I’m referring to. It’s the communication with family and lay people that sets up an acute barrier of misunderstanding I find completely unnecessary. And just as it was true in real estate, I know the public would benefit from an overhaul of the neurological medical jargon they’ve all come to accept without question, and therefore perpetuate without examining what’s being communicated.

Which ones disturb me the most? You’ve already heard most of them in a different context in this essay. ‘Agitated’ has always conveyed to me a nervous or anxious state with movement, and although I know that technically it can include violence, I’ve never found the atmosphere around that word conveyed such forcefulness unless accompanied by another adjective, like ‘extreme’. So when a neurological state is described as ‘agitation’ when it’s completely out of control, I wonder about the acceptance given to a communication that is completely misleading. ‘Acute’ is another surprise for me. When used to describe a condition in the brain or the rehabilitation necessary for someone without control of muscles, I would assume the condition is at the highest code of attack. There is a speed and severity attached to that word in my mind that’s completely lacking for the neurologists. As they use it, it seems to mean expected and completely acceptable as long as it doesn’t change. When I questioned an excellent young therapist about both ‘acute’ and ‘agitated’ recently he announced that he knew they were misleading terms but as everyone used them in the hospital, they became the norm. Whew, I do hope I can continue to examine them and find them totally unacceptable.

Sometimes the only way to get through certain trauma, however, is to laugh about it. That was certainly the only way to get through the tough days in real estate, banking, and physical fitness, and now I find it works well in the hospital environment, too.  After launching into a complaint about the misnomer “Urgent Care”, the new label for “Emergency Service”, with one of the highly experienced nurses I’ve come to know, we both decided that we didn’t understand the definition of ‘urgent’. Surely it carried with it a commitment to something crucial or critical, and there was a time pressure we both felt as part of the word’s aura. An average of 15 hours of waiting to be seen in ‘Urgent Care’ convinced us we must be wrong. I suggested perhaps the focus should be on the care and not the urgency, but we both realized immediately that the word had to be replaced with ‘need’. Yes in fact it was the need that was urgent, but the care is something I’m not going to try to deal with here.

Lest you think I spend all my time lately agitated about the acute condition of the English language, weeping over the urgency of the attention that should be brought to bear over its usage, I’ll reassure you that there are still plenty of people around who understand each other and know how to laugh over what many would find impossibly horrifying. Just ask a post-operative care nurse to describe some of his or her adventures ducking patients’ black belt Karate moves, assuring 911 they’re not holding a patient hostage, or counting out $5M worth of cash brought to the hospital by an unknown Soviet patient demanding a brain transplant, and you’ll learn as I have recently how important it is to share a laugh if you want to communicate instead of worrying about the semantics of a vocabulary designed perhaps to preserve a  sense of uniqueness instead of inclusiveness. The language of laughter is by its very nature collaborative, and therefore communicates in a different way. I may not be able to write ‘funny’, but I can sure understand and appreciate it for the sharing it brings.  I think laughter is a better communicator than words, if the truth be known, but I’m not going to give up my concern for the way words are used just yet. I still feel an urgent need to find the right ones to say what I mean.