Abbreviations

August 31, 2023

I was working in my office yesterday when I felt Zena stick her head under my arm.  Zena is generally patient when she wants something, but there are definite signs that let me know she wants something.  When Zena wants to go outside, she will stand in front of the door and stare at me.  When I am in my chair watching the nightly news and it nears supper time, Zena will come and lay her chin on my knee while looking up at me.  If I am back in my office where I cannot see her food bowl or the door, she will stick her head under my arm and snuggle close to my chest, all the while looking up at me with those sad eyes.  This gets my attention, but I usually put her off until I finish the immediate task I am working on.  When I get up Zena will prance toward the hall and look back to make sure I am going to follow.  When I do follow, Zena will take me wherever she wants me to go and shows me what she wants.  I have learned that sticking her head under my arm is Zena’s way of giving me the equivalent of the STAT abbreviations used in a hospital.

When I looked online, I found “stat” originated in pharmacology where the word would be written on a prescription to mean “immediately”.  Abbreviations are frequently used in medicine and can boost efficiency if they are used intelligently.  The advantage of brevity should be weighed against the possibility of making the communication harder for others to understand (obfuscation) and having more than one possible interpretation (ambiguity).  Certain medical abbreviations are avoided to prevent mistakes, according to best practices and in some cases regulatory requirements.  Examples of this avoidance are abbreviations for names of drugs, using apothecary’s units, and using trailing zeros or not using a leading zero.  Stat is part of a larger list of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions.  The Oxford English Dictionary gives two citations for this.  The first dates to 1875 where W. H. Griffith’s Lessons on Prescriptions (iv. 18) cites “Stat., immediately.”  The second comes from 1971 where Lancet 25 Sept. 700/2 cites “Stat., to be given at once.”  The word stat is an abbreviation of the Latin word statim, which means “instantly or immediately”.  This usage has generalized beyond the domain of prescriptions to refer to any medical action that needs to be taken immediately. 

The word abbreviation comes from the Latin brevis, meaning “short”, and refers to a shortened form of a word or phrase.  This may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase, and an example would be for the word abbreviation itself, represented by the abbreviations abbr., abbrv., or abbrev.  NPO is another medical abbreviation for nil (or nothing) per (by) os (mouth) in medical instructions.  Abbreviations may also consist of just initials, a mixture of initials and words, or words or letters representing words in another language (for example, e.g., i.e., or RSVP).  Sometimes abbreviations are an acronym (some pronounceable, some initialisms), or grammatical contractions, or a contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong, making one word out of two (crasis).  This paragraph is an example for why we will use abbreviations.

Thoughts:  Most have been caught in a situation listening to a conversation between specialists in a field where they reel off a series of acronyms and abbreviations as they discuss some issue.  The conversation makes it easier for the practitioners who know exactly what they are talking about, but the technical terms, acronyms, and abbreviations can exclude others who do not know the language.  This is another reason learning a different language can be difficult as this same type of word usage is embedded in our speech.  Language fluency can be used to differentiate between us and them, or we can take the time to explain what we mean in ways all will understand.  Act for all.  Change is coming and it starts with you.