Chuck Peek’s 2021 March blog
Nope, wrong guess. Equalactin is not a sugar substitute for the lactose intolerant. It’s a laxative. You know, made by those folks who like to run their television commercials while you are grabbing a bite.
And from that, the segue: since we are in the midst of Lent, it’s high time to look a bit at human folly and possibly divine comedy. Here’s a great passage to get us started:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every[thing] and brought them to the man to see what he would call them . . . The man gave names to [them] all. Genesis 2 19-20
I’m not sure what God was thinking! Creation was tiring—just pass off the last job to someone else? Or maybe the problem was the choice of “the man” to do the job. Men are terrible at naming. I wanted to name my first-born Obadiah Eliphalet. Or was it Eliphalet Obadiah? Such a nice ring, and biblical to boot. Lost that one to the household majority vote: Nancy said a fairly vocal nyet.
Still, I’m prone to think that, like Homer, God sometimes “nodded.” It is hard to think of many bigger blunders than palming off the naming job. We’ve mis-labled so many things. Naming may not have seemed so bad when it was just cattle and trees and the like.
Even then I’m reminded of the drunk who fell down in the road late one summer night and found himself looking eye to eye with a grasshopper. “Why,” slurred the drunk to the grasshopper, “Did you know there was a drink named after you?” “What,” said the grasshopper, “There’s a drink named Howard?”
But, today, I’m sadly far away from the blunder of grasshoppers named Howard and German names that fill an entire page, past the wave of renaming that made Lew Alcindor into Kareem Abdul Jabar. Names, of course, can be statements, and his name change made a statement, marked a change in our narrative of ourselves.
My failed attempt to change my name was not based on anything so noble. Because my handwriting was so poor, my last name came out looking like Puk, so I was known as Chuck Puck, and Chuck Puck dreamed of being named something more glamorous, something like the Lance Reventlow whose picture I’d seen as he sacrificed a valuable lead at the Mille Miglia to enjoy a glass of wine in a small Italian village while other racers zoomed around his idling racer. It was not to be, but I did shed the name Chuckie that my grandmother called me in front of a car load of fraternity brothers who wouldn’t let it go. One of the rights and privileges of graduation!
But, today, it’s not my own name I’m concerned with. Today, I’m looking at the names of current popular medications. Nothing I know of so reveals the whole horror of God’s little lapse. Or bigger joke. Just take for example the names of some of the most advertised, most prescribed, most taken drugs:
Abilify, Celebrex, Chantix, Dupixent, Eliquis, Emgality, Farxiga, Humira, Latuda, Prilosec, Viagra, Xeljanz, Xiidra
Viagra. Now there’s a whopper! (Sorry, I promised myself not to do that but it just grew on me. Oops, sorry again.)
Ludicrous neology! And though these names seem sufficiently bad in themselves, they often stand in for much worse names. Farxiga is actually a kind of nickname for dapagliflozin, Prilosec for Omeprazole.
Dapagliflozin sounds like some sort of body fluid that came spurting out of an open sore; Omeprazole, like a rare Italian dish in a New York bistro run by a Middle Easterner.
Here’s my guess. Most of the chemists in the pharma labs avoided English classes like the plague. They were bored stiff during the lessons on the dictionary. The whole notion of syllables was lost on them. Perrine’s sturdy Sound and Sense sat the semester out in their book bags.
This is not a new development, only an old disorder zooming ahead at light speed. The Bubonic Plague was a name for Yersinia Pestis, and with a word like Yersinia around, you wonder why they invented the word bubonic.
“What have I got, doc?”
“Yersinia.”
“Think what you like about me, doc, but for God’s sake tell me what I’ve got!”
There have been efforts in so many nations to control their national language, all of them pretty much failures if they aren’t backed up by the guillotine. But I’m beginning to think laissez-faire lingualism may not be such a hot idea either. Who chose a pharma lab to be the arbiter that would shout at us in commercials and whisper to us from our medicine cabinets?
Dire names accompany the dire warnings that accompany the medication—yes, it effectively cures the rash on your skin but of course you run the risk of an exploding liver. And, say, who actually needs the warning that, if you are allergic to it, you should stop taking it? I know we’ve done our best to dumb down the world, but do we really need to tell someone to stop taking something they are allergic to?
I know that the chief contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary was certifiably insane, but he had some word cred. This season’s neologizers are as sane as can be and have no ear at all. We’ve had plenty of satires on mad scientists for whom the ‘fail safe’ was nowhere near safe enough, but, somehow, we’ve let the word-maulers go blithely along coining what look like words and boosting their currency with another of the dreaded inventions of our age, the commercial. Most of them so bad, they have to promote an annual Super Bowl to cull out the half-dozen or so ads that somehow came out with genuine sentiment or real humor, escaping somehow the best stratagems of the word-grinders.
Just like trees have no commercial value until they are cut down, so words go unsung until they’ve been through the meatgrinder that churns out the ground lexicon of our times. There’s a literary school called The Russian Formalists that championed what was once translated as “defamiliarization,” from the Russian word transliterated as ostranenie (“making strange”). The writers influenced by this now go by the even stranger tag of Martian Writers. Every good idea is easily taken to an extreme. But pharmacological naming hype puts all that to shame. Other kinds of word sacrilege are not even in the race. Not competitive at all.
Now, sing along. Oh, you didn’t know these lyrics each had its own tune? I said tune, not melody, but often exuberantly intoned by an ersatz chorus or orchestra. Sometimes, they’ve paid big bucks for a tune once on the charts. Not even the songs that got us through adolescence are sacred to them.
Still, these are the names we are stuck with at least for the foreseeable future, so I close with a guide to the possible untangling of the word’s meanings from their nonsense syllables, and invite any who would like to make your own suggestions to send them as comments. Send them to someone’s email or snail mail, just not mine, but with copies please to the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers who are, in this case, the usual suspects.
Some of these decipherings are possibly also medicines, some definitely not, and, of course, it’s not always easy to tell which is which.
A Sample decipherers guide for preparing for the ACT* test
(*AcetylsaliCylic Tablets)
Abilify–no doubt indemnifies you against almost any ability you might have once had
Celebrex–for half of all Brits—the drug that will make your celebration of Brexit complete
Chantix–this drug will help persuade a ticket agent to get you tickets to an SRO concert
Dupicent—your usual milk except it fools you
Eliquis–renders anyone inbred enough to be 4th or 5th generation Marquis eloquent on the first dose
Emgality—just as you guessed, an enema that works as well on the poor as on the rich, often prescribed along with Emgraternity and Emgriberty, at least in France
Farxiga—an adjective for going gaga based on the cartoons of Gary Larson
Humira—the first resort if your doctor finds you have no sense of humor and are alarmingly irate
Latuda—privately owned student housing for colleges located at higher altitudes
Prilosec—An in-house term for a deviant on the Special Victims Unit of Law and Order
Viagra—How to get from Canada to the USA in a barrel over the same falls where honeymooners say, Gosh, it’s bigger than I imagined. (Again, sorry.)
Xeljanz—Between no chance and a fat chance
Xiidra–a Hydra pledged by Theta Xi
Consult the above guide for samples of how to enter Contest One: try to ungarble this for today’s bonus prize:
Evkeeza (evinacumab-dgnb) is an angiopoietin-like 3 (ANGPTL3) inhibitor
(My Lord, there’s even a sort of a simile right smack dab in the description!)
Or enter Contest Two: reply (directions above) with your favorite medication name and its much more sensible definition in the dictionary of by guess and by gosh.
Please, send only words—the names—not the drugs named. Endangering Senior Citizens’ health is a crime carrying serious punishments, albeit much milder than those for assaulting a medical practitioner for using these words in your delicate presence.
Kearney, Nebraska
March 10, 2021—one week out from our second COVID-19 vaccination!
capeek 