Flowery Language

When people talk, listen to the words they choose.  People are judged on the way they speak every day.  Whether or not they say "like" a lot, if they use proper grammar, and the "caliber" of words they choose are all things that form ideas about their intelligence in other people's minds.  Something I have noticed a lot, especially in school, is the use of lots of fancy words when simpler words will suffice.  Sometimes people try to use words of which they don't know the meaning, but I'm not talking about them.  I'm talking about the people that try to make themselves seem smarter or superior by using as many twenty-dollar words as they can. 

When I'm sitting in school, I don't get to hear patient cases, I get to hear patient-care case vignettes.  We no longer go to work, we go to our "work sites" which will become our "practice sites" after we graduate.  People don't talk about things they've seen at work, they talk about experiences they have encountered in their practice.  We no longer have externships, we have "introductory and advanced pharmacy practice experiences."  As pharmacists, one of our jobs is to encourage patients to be "concordant" with their therapy.  Who even knows what that means? It's the new term for "adherence" which was coined when "compliance" was deemed not to be politically correct.  When we write "patient care notes" we have to say things like "her past medical history is significant for hypertension" not that she has high blood pressure.  They mean the same thing and one is much simpler and easier to understand.  One professor actually said, instead of "you should ask a nurse," that we should "utilize our multidisciplinary friends."  Now that's going a little too far. 

I had to stay after class once because I was "using my positive influence over the class to squash people's self-efficacy."  I had no idea what she meant by that, but didn't take the time to ask what her fancy (and I think some made-up) terms actually meant.  I think the problem she had was that I said differentiating between concordance, adherence, and compliance was stupid.  My other point during that day's discussion was that people don't care if you refer to them as "customers" or "patients" when they come into a drug store (sorry… a pharmacy practice site).  It confuses some people, because they think of themselves as "patients" when they're in the hospital, and even if we are providing healthcare, they are also paying for a product and service from a business, so they are customers.  When we call doctors about things, we refer to the people as "patients."  It all depends on context and who you're talking to, but in a lot of cases, it just doesn't matter.

Now I understand the need, in medicine especially, to speak and write in such a way that your intent is clear and the points you make are specific, but when you add all that flowery language, it just makes for more to sort through and takes extra time.  Shouldn't we be using as few words as possible to fully get a point across since we're so busy as healthcare workers?

My main point is that when you speak, choose the correct words ("because these words have meaning") but don't go over the top trying to impress people with extravagant language that is time-consuming and over-the-top-unnecessary for the situation.