Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to release...
Hey, podcast listener! Martha here with a special minicast of A Way with Words. Today I want to tell you a story — and make a request for you to support A Way with Words. The story is about a guy named Luigi. He was born in 1737 in Bologna, Italy...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s brain teaser involves mixed-up body parts. For example, suppose he says, “Listen you, stop bothering me or I’m going to give you a toe sandwich!” What part of one’s anatomy did he really mean? This is part of a complete...
Kim from Osoyoos, British Columbia, Canada, is studying anatomy and wonders why the lower end of one’s sternum is called the xiphoid process. The word process in this case means projection, and xiphoid comes from the Greek word for sword. Early...
The Greek word for the cuckoo bird, kokkux, is related to our word coccyx, the tailbone, because the bone looks like the bill of a cuckoo. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Cuckoo and Coccyx Connection” The Greek word for cuckoo...
Anatomy is full of eponyms — that is, words inspired by the name of a person. For examples, there are the fallopian tubes, the Achilles heel, and the eustachian tubes. But there’s a movement in anatomy to replace eponyms with more scientific...
