{"id":367,"date":"2010-06-29T18:14:55","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T01:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nothingtoreadhere.com\/?p=367"},"modified":"2010-06-29T18:14:55","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T01:14:55","slug":"thats-bullshit-second-name-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/?p=367","title":{"rendered":"That’s bullshit: Second name edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I know you’ve all been wondering my stance on this for a while, so it’s time I got it out in the open: I’m often ok with the secondary names of body parts or ailments that get used more frequently than the proper ones. For example, I like the fact that “Achilles tendon” is used instead of “calcaneal tendon,” as it’s a nice nod to the Greek mythology I enjoyed learning as a kid. Similarly, I can appreciate why we would lean toward using the bluntly descriptive “pink eye” over “conjunctivitis.” But when it came time to come up with a secondary name for the masses to use instead of rheum, the powers that be failed us all miserably.<\/p>\n

What is rheum? See – its secondary name has already wiped the real name out of our vocabulary!\u00a0 (So\u00a0even with the power of the internet and upwards of nine whole readers, this post will amount to little or nothing. Yet I press on!)\u00a0 Rheum, I’ll have you know, is defined by the experts at Wikipedia as the “thin mucus naturally discharged as a watery substance from the eyes, nose, or mouth during sleep…(that) gathers as a crust in the corners of the eyes or mouth, on the eyelids, or under the nose.” I don’t know about you, but I grew up calling that substance “sleep.” Wikipedia also suggests the painful-sounding “sand,” the odd compound word “sleepydust,” or the confusingly plural “sleepies.”<\/p>\n

Sticking with the term I know and still unfortunately use to this day, how the hell did that ever get traction? Seriously, let’s think about this for a minute. Was the originator of this term just being poetic before people took him or her literally?\u00a0 I think there’s something quite pleasant about the description of waking up with a touch of sleep still in one’s eyes…as long as it stays on that metaphorical level.\u00a0 Otherwise, it’s just confusing.\u00a0 Why name the substance after the noun that causes it to appear in the first place?\u00a0 It’s like calling sweat “heat,” or referring to body weight as “food.”\u00a0 It’s strange, right?\u00a0\u00a0 I sleep, and when I’m done with my sleep, I awake to…sleep?\u00a0 I take it back, that’s not just strange…that’s bullshit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know you’ve all been wondering my stance on this for a while, so it’s time I got it out in the open: I’m often ok with the secondary names of body parts or ailments that get used more frequently than the proper ones. For example, I like the fact that “Achilles tendon” is used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}