Veterinary Terminology Part 1: Medicalese, jargon, & professional language (#503)

Veterinary Terminology is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use.

How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking.

This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly.

Veterinary medicine depends on language in ways we rarely stop to examine.

We use words to localize lesions, describe function, justify decisions, teach students, reassure clients, and document responsibility.

Most of the time, that language works quietly in the background - unquestioned, inherited, and habitual.

This first essay begins not with anatomy or neurology, but with a more foundational issue:

How professional language drifts.

Specifically, it looks at something many of us recognize instinctively but rarely name:

Medicalese.

What Medicalese Is and What It Is Not

Medicalese is often confused with technical terminology.

They are not the same.

• Scientific terminology exists to be precise. It encodes anatomy, physiology, pathology, and mechanism. It is essential.

• Professional shorthand develops for efficiency. It can be useful, but only when its meaning remains anchored.

• Medicalese is different. It is language that has become habitual, abstract, and self-referential, often sounding professional while saying less than it appears to.

  
  

Medicalese is not wrong in a grammatical sense.

Medicalese is wrong in a thinking sense.

How Medicalese Sounds

Medicalese often reveals itself through familiar constructions:

• The operation was carried out.

• The patient failed treatment.

• It was decided to proceed with surgery.

• The dog presented with seizures.

• The condition was managed.

These phrases are instantly recognizable. They sound formal. They sound clinical. They also share something else in common.

They obscure agency, process, or responsibility:

• Nothing was literally carried.

• No patient actively failed.

• No decision emerged spontaneously.

• No animal presented itself.

• Nothing was literally managed.

Medicalese replaces action with abstraction.

Why Medicalese Exists

Medicalese did not arise from carelessness.

It persists for understandable reasons:

• It shortens communication.

• It is inherited from mentors and notes.

• It softens emotional weight.

• It protects clinicians from exposure, and

• It signals professional membership.

Over time, these reasons harden into habit. Habit becomes style. Style becomes invisible.

That invisibility is the problem.

Why This Matters Professionally

Language shapes what we notice and what we overlook.

When agency disappears from language, it also disappears from thinking.

When metaphor replaces description, mechanisms blur.

When passive constructions dominate, responsibility becomes diffuse.

This is not about sounding plain or informal.

It is about speaking honestly about what actually happens.

A profession that cannot describe its own actions clearly eventually struggles to justify them.

Precision Versus Performance

Even words that seem better can carry unexamined metaphor.

Consider the phrase:

I performed the operation.

This restores agency, but borrows language from theater and ritual. Performance implies an audience, a role, a display. Surgery is none of these. It is judgment, intervention, and consequence.

There is no perfect verb. But there is value in noticing the metaphors we have stopped hearing.

Awareness precedes choice.

Jargon is not The Enemy

This is not an argument against jargon when jargon is doing real work.

Terms like ataxia, paresis, nociception, and thoracic limb exist because they compress meaning without losing it.

They allow professionals to think precisely and communicate efficiently.

Medicalese does the opposite.

It expands sound while compressing meaning.

The danger is not technical language. It is empty professionalism.

Translation Versus Substitution

Veterinary medicine requires translation.

Clients deserve language that is accessible and humane.

But translation is not the same as substitution.

We can explain clearly without abandoning precision.

We can be compassionate without becoming vague.

We can speak plainly without erasing responsibility.

The internal language of the profession must remain intact, or there will be nothing accurate left to translate.

Why This Series Begins Here

This series does not start with dementia, limbs, pain, or gait for a reason.

Before we can examine specific terms, we must first notice:

• How language habits form,

• How they persist, and

• How easily they replace thought with familiarity.

Once that is seen, the rest of the series follows naturally.

In Part 2, we will turn to a term that feels compassionate and familiar, but is conceptually misplaced in veterinary medicine:

Dementia.

And we will ask what happens when human constructs quietly migrate into animal medicine without scrutiny.

Language does not merely describe veterinary medicine.

Language is veterinary medicine.

If we do not listen carefully to the words we use, we should not be surprised when our thinking begins to sound the same.

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