Nov 14, 2012
Mnemonic plague
Do you ever get to a point where you look at medical words for so long they don't seem real?
Today I was grading a Nursing student's literature search assignment, in which she chose not to truncate pneumonia. I started thinking, wrong, pneumonic is a variation that she should look for. Is it a word? Yes, it's a word. But it doesn't SEEM like a word? Is it a word? And so on, for about 3 minutes. Finally I called it quits and looked it up to make sure.
It turns out pneumonic IS a word, but I was thinking of the sound of the word "mnemonic" and applying it to pneumon(ic).
*LIBRARIAN FAIL*