I don’t care much for spelling or grammar. My native language, Serbian, has no concept of the former thanks to its being phonetic. As for the latter, few people in my home town and the surrounding area cared too much about it, flinging tenses, forms and declinations around carelessly. I proudly continue this tradition.
What gets to me is semantics. Misspelling tachypnoeic is unfortunate; saying that the patient’s head is normocephalic means either that it had grown a head of its own, or that the speaker had no idea what the word they were using signified1.
So anyway, lots of big words and a sizable footnote just to introduce something I’ll likely be doing on a weekly basis—-complaining about today’s youth and their improper use of medical verbiage2.
Carry on.
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Never mind that an average internists sees an abnormality like dolichocephaly once every 10 years—-thus obliviating the need to say that someone’s head has a normal shape in each and every admission note. Not that most physicians would recognize dolichocephaly if and when they saw it. ↩
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Lets pretend that my entire medical experience thus far does not consist of just over two years of IM residency. Also, English is not my primary language. ↩