Strong Work, Medical Jargon

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Tom Ryman calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hi Tom from Minneapolis, well welcome.

What can we do for you?

I’m a fourth year medical student here in Minnesota and I’ve loved medicine for a lot of reasons

And one of them is there’s a lot of good language in it.

Oh yeah.

From all sorts of origins and all sorts of languages and with lots of good stories.

But one kind of newer phrase that I came across was last year on my surgery and emergency medicine

Rotations, I had a lot of people who would say if something was done well, they’d say strong work on

That. And it was something that initially I thought, oh, maybe this is just some new slang

That I haven’t come across. And then I realized I was hearing it a lot in all sorts of contexts,

But they were all medical. I didn’t really hear it anywhere else and other friends hadn’t heard it

Outside of medicine. So I did a little bit of Googling and it was kind of hard to tease that

Apart from some things like strong work ethic came up.

But I did find a few message boards that talked about it as a specifically medical thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

You’ve done the right work.

And you found the same conclusion that we would come up with, which is this is medical

Slang or I’d say maybe even jargon.

It belongs specifically to this industry and especially to medical students.

We had a call on our voicemail a while back from somebody who had the exact same circumstance.

She’d never heard it until she started her surgical residency, and she heard it everywhere around her from the surgeons and other people in the medical fields.

And it’s not uncommon for you to be immersed in something and suddenly just find yourself awash in this new language.

And I think you may also have heard things like pimping.

Do you know this one?

Yes, I do.

And that’s one I think might have been featured on the show previously.

That’s right.

We did talk about it.

Yeah, it’s when the teaching doctor basically badgers the student doctors to ask them their information on a particular patient or subject, right?

Is that your understanding?

Right, and they keep coming at you with harder and harder questions until you fail.

That’s right, right, because the goal is to break you.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s interesting because we do that in improv as well.

If you’re pimping somebody, you’ll say to your scene partner, like, and how did that song go or something?

And then they have to come up with all these lyrics for a song.

But it’s called pimping, the same idea.

Do you have any idea how long it’s been around?

I don’t.

I found, when I’ve looked into this, I found it as far back as in books from the 80s.

But by the 90s, when the internet started exploding, it started popping up everywhere

As people were kind of publishing these medical student glossaries.

And then everyone was basically ripping off those glossaries.

And then they would appear on other websites and other books.

And the 90s kind of were a really good time for finding things out.

But also it meant that it was easier to plagiarize from everyone else.

So it kind of blows your chance to really find a source for some things like this.

Well, there’s so many other phrases, like I said, strong work ethic that come up when you’re searching for it.

So, yeah, it’s hard to isolate.

You do those negative switches.

Just put a negative before.

So look for strong work as a quote, and then type in work ethic as a quote,

And put a hyphen or a negative sign in front of work ethic, and it will eliminate those from your results.

Okay.

That sounds good.

And does it really come up in other specific jargons?

No.

No, not with this kind of frequency, no, but as a particular bit of medical patter, it’s very firmly in the medical realm.

And isn’t that interesting because it doesn’t seem like it has a particularly medical origin.

I can’t imagine what that would be, but it’s interesting that it hasn’t jumped over to other fields.

Right, and I think because it has a sort of bravado sound to it, I thought maybe it was just the way that surgeons talked or emergency docs talked because they have sort of a culture like that.

It is so well known that not only does it appear in glossaries, but you will see it on medical television shows.

They have totally adopted this.

Their medical advisors who help them try to be more authentic will insert this or have this available to the scriptwriters.

What a job.

What a job.

Well, good luck.

You’re in fourth year.

How many more years to go?

Well, this is my last year of school, and so I’m applying to residency right now.

Okay.

Well, good luck with that.

I know that’s kind of nail-biting.

A little bit, yeah, but we get through it.

Tom, I have a feeling that you can call us back in the future with lots more examples.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’m sure I will.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye.

All righty.

Bye.

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