I’ve been rather swamped with work lately. Not because the work is so much, but because the energy is so little. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about energy and motivation. Those are some interesting and rather fickle birds. Perhaps I’ll post more on those ideas…when I actually have energy and motivation 
My job is medical transcription. I like my job, which makes my frustration extra frustrating because I can’t blame my lack of energy and motivation on a poor fit between my abilities, interests and the actual job.
I enjoy typing. I like learning new things. And I like language. Interestingly, language aptitude is something I discovered was helpful in learning to do medical transcription. Since I can picture root words and similar words as well as remember new words fairly easily, I have not found it too hard to acquire this new language. It also helps that I only type for doctors practicing one branch of medicine.
I also like my job because it is not emotionless, mindless typing. These are real people, with real lives, and my heart is often deeply moved as I transcribe their stories. The diagnostic procedure is also fascinating to me–my ISFJ brain likes the whole concept of thinking in differentials, etiologies and variables as the doctors often do when working their way through symptoms, testing and diagnosis.
Sometimes I cry for the patients (and wonder if its unethical to do so…) Sometimes I pray for a patient and wonder if it matters. Sometimes I smile at a doctor’s personality traits that come through in his dictating style. Sometimes I wonder about all the factors not spoken of and not taken into account in the diagnosis and treatment process. Things like the whys of someone continuing to smoke while they battle asthma or lung cancer. I can hear the doctor’s frustration, yet I think, There has to be a reason.
All of these things keep my job interesting.
Okay, I didn’t mean to get all philosophical there. Really, what I have is a rather shallow question. There are a few words that are giving me trouble. Funny enough, they are not the long complicated words. For some reason, those are easier to learn than these little homonyms which I keep stumbling over.
I wonder if you all can give me some brain hooks to help me remember the differences between these stumpers, so that when I hear them, I can easily keep straight which spelling I want, without having to resort every time to Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary or Google (when I have to stop to look the words up, I tend to get distracted by other neighboring words or links, which is not helpful for making my work efficient.
My homonymic (Oh, my word–that’s really a word. I expected spell checker to underline it!) stumpers:
proceed vs. precede
disk vs. disc
chord vs. cord
And the big one that aggravated me today when I had to look it up yet again is:
mucus (the noun defined as “the free slime of the mucous membranes, composed of secretion of the glands, along with various inorganic salts, desquamated cells, and leukocytes”, just in case you wanted to know) vs. mucous (the adjective)
I’ll sort of get it straight with some memory trick, and then I’ll think about the trick so much that I get even more confused. Maybe your fresh (and possibly funny) ideas will help me keep these pairs straight. Who knows why one set of words is easier to keep straight than another? For whatever reason, I don’t mix up affect and effect. When in doubt, I always think “side effect” and am confident that I have the right spelling. From there I think about the part of speech the word has in that context and then compare that part of speech to the word I’m typing. Fortunately, that process happens rather quickly In any case, side effect with an “e” is emotionally hooked in my brain, and vocal cord or chord is not.
my wife is probably the one to answer this one instead of me…they all stumped me when I looked at them…
how about this for the chord/cord combo
Chord primarily has to do w/ music chord (see the pipe organ pipe sticking up in that spelling (the “h”)
Whereas cord catches cord as in rope, cord as in measurement of wood, cord as in spinal cord.
you can do w/ this suggestion whatever you want
DM
OK, what is the difference between disk and disc?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc
DM, The pipe organ “h” just might work. Because I can remember that the one in your throat that makes noise is spelled whichever way the music type is not. So, if I can bring to mind the “h” with a picture of music, I think I might remember it.
I’d love to hear your wife’s input, too. There are still a few more pairs to figure out. The more the merrier, and hopefully, the more the right spellings will stick.
Thainamu,
Wow, I didn’t know there were so many different usages of those words. That’s quite a list. I hope I can find a way to remember (without having to check Wiki each time) the one that’s in your backbone.
I can’t help you with the word stuff, but do you use a typing expander? Some people can’t think that way, I think, but if you can it can save you some work.
I taught myself Gregg Shorthand a few years ago, and now have a shortcut tool that expands my shortcuts. I’ve built a several thousand word dictionary, so most words are in it. Of course, medical transcriptionists often have repeating paragraphs or sentences in their trade, so they might expand things hugely. But that doesn’t work for me, since I don’t have those kinds of repeating paragraphs. I just expand one word at a time, for the most part.
If I trn off h tul, my typg dosnt lk ha dfnt, mab, bt sm rds rle do xpand a gr deal.
The stats stored by the system say my little dictionary has eliminated 44% of my keystrokes over the last 2 years. Some of us are just a little geekier than others.
Ooh, word questions. I love those! And I’m the same way on mucous and mucus — when I worked at the publishing house, one of the imprints I worked for was a health imprint, publishing books on health. You can imagine that the words mucous and mucus showed up quite often! I had to look them up frequently to remember which was which. Argh.
For proceed and precede, it helps me to remember the prefixes. “Pro” means “for,” and proceed means to go forward from something else. “Pre” means “before,” which says that something preceding something else means that it comes before it. Does that make any sense?
Disk and disc was another one I had to keep straight when working on those health books. It helped to think of the “k” in disk as a sharp edge, since the letter has sharp edges, and this helped me remember that a disk is a hard inanimate object. It would always make me think of those small 3 1/2 x 5 disks that nobody uses anymore in their computers to save documents on. So the hard “k” is connected to the small, square, hard disks for the computers.
I don’t think I have anything helpful to share about chord and cord, since music and piano were a part of my life from very early ages. Whenever I see chord, I think of music chords.
Oh, I just thought of something, though, that might help. When I say “chord,” I can feel a little something extra in my throat, a slight effort to pronounce the “h.” And maybe this extra effort is tied to the fact that a musical chord is a triad of three notes played together, creating harmony. So the extra effort of an extra letter is tied to the musical notion of playing more notes together to create a fuller sound, too.
Don’t know if any of that explanation made any sense or was helpful, but I hope at least something in there was!
Not that this is much help, but I believe it is wise to go easy on the Goggle:
Mucus, getting out ..relax, take a deep breath http://www.righthealth.com
Nora Johnson quote: I’ve seen $90 for a 70-cent i. v…
How about $129 for a mucous recovery system?
That’s a lot for a box of Kleenex…
The other requests may take more time.. All the best…
Thank you all for your interesting and diverse help.
Codepoke, I really want to know more about your shorthand system. WordPerfect has a function called QuickCorrect, which I use as a typing expander. It works fine, but it is a pain to try to come up with all of my own shorthand. It ends up being trial and error, and I sometimes find a particular combination hard to remember, unnatural to type or, inadvertantly, a combination that I actually use at other times (e.g. an abbreviation I hadn’t remembered that I use).
Christianne, that job you had sounds fun (was it?) Thanks for brainstorming with me. And it is comforting (in a “misery loves company” way) to know that I’m not the only one who has to look up such common words frequently.
Bill, wow! I can’t imagine spending $129 on that! I’m so cheap, we usually use toilet paper (the cheap kind of that, too) in place of the fancy boxes of kleenex.