§140. A Polyglot Guide to Human Anatomy

The following lexicon should not be taken too seriously. It is a rough-and-ready attempt to match up names of human body parts and organs in English, Greek,^[1] and Latin. Any serious effort to learn anatomical and medical terminology should be a task of many weeks, even months; a two-page summary can only provide a glimpse of what is required. Nevertheless, it is remarkable how few specialized roots one needs to learn, after a course of this kind, in order to manage quite well in recognizing—if not fully understanding—highly technical medical terms.

You will see at once that some of the words below are seldom if ever used in scientific discourse; those forms are provided merely for the sake of comparison.

At the risk of appearing scatological, we can deal briefly with the end product (or by-product) of the alimentary canal. The old English word shit has an etymology that links it with the Greek root σχιζ- (“split”), source of E schism, schist, and schizophrenia. Greek σκωρ, σκατ-ος (whence scatological) may be matched with Latin excrementum; the words for animal dung were κοπρος and stercus. (Some mushrooms may be described as coprophilic, and disgusting speech is known as coprolalia —“dung talk.”) E feces, now a standard technical term for excrement, is derived from a Latin word that had nothing to do with excretion: L faeces (“wine-dregs”) still meant “dregs” or “sediment” in English until 1639. Etymologically speaking, therefore, defecate means “to get the dregs out.”