When I started gathering material for this posting, I discovered that nearly all the words for horrific, distasteful or disgusting sexual activity are reasonably well known and, quite frankly, worn out. They are words that… How can I put this delicately? They are words that you may have accidentally bumped into while enjoying perfectly innocent pursuits. In any event, they have not made it onto this list. I have not tried to bowdlerize this posting, I’ve simply confined myself to rare words. Here’s my list of ten.

1. Pansexualism. According to some myth or other, men think about sex every 7 seconds. It obviously isn’t true, but it’s a clever thing to suggest if only because it any such proclamation is bound to attract attention. The assertion is not so easy to refute either. You  can simply observe the flow of your thoughts and see whether it’s true, but then you run into that thorny Heisenberg problem of interfering with the experiment by observing. But wait, who else is going to observe my thoughts, I wonder. In fact I wonder who made that beguiling little statistic up – probably a pansexualist.

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I  was born into a partly medical family, in that my mother was once a nurse and later a matron, and my uncle Ken was a heart surgeon. This has imbued me with a genuine respect for the medical profession but also a mild skepticism for some of its achievements. As in every human calling, there are brilliant practitioners and incompetent ones. The hippocratic oath places a huge responsibility on the shoulders of all doctors and, inevitably, not all doctors can shoulder it.

In selecting 10 medical words, I’ve done my best to eschew words for obscure syndromes and involved surgical procedures – of which there are many – and focused instead on unusual words which you’re unlikely to have encountered, unless you work in the medical profession.

1. Iatrapistia: Whether you experience iatrapistia depends upon context.

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“In God we trust, all others we virus scan” – Anon

Eventually you start to get sick of all these AV adverts. If it were honest, this quote would read: In God we trust, all other we virus scan, but because we don’t have the latest batch of signatures we get infected anyway unless we’re intelligent enough to be running a Mac or Linux or we have whitelisting software.

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Unfortunately, magazine reviewers face the same problems as other humans when it comes to reviewing software, and have collectively made some very embarrasing mistakes. So it is not surprising that many consumers turn to advertising as their source of information. In the anti-virus world in the U.S., advertising is full of myth, tricky wording, and outright falsehood, but users are in no position to sift the evidence. – Dr. David Stang, Seven Locks Software

This pretty well hits the nail on the head.

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