Do Correct Pronunciations Matter? I Vote Yes!

Yesterday, while scanning a nursing-related forum, I came upon a thread that deals with mispronunciations of medical terms. Well, it started out as medical term errors but then moved on to pet peeves regarding all kinds of pronunciation and grammatical faux pas. The thread began a month ago and now has almost 400 posts, so it has touched a nerve with readers.

I am one of those annoying people who must exercise extreme control in order not to correct the errors I hear. Sometimes the control fails—that’s what makes me annoying. I have a list of pet peeves as long as my arm: the word picture being pronounced as pitcher, the use of less when it should be fewer and (in my #1 spot) using I when it should be me. A certain Harvard educated late night TV host consistently says such things as, "My in-laws are visiting my wife and I." I actually yell at the TV, "My wife and ME!" That particular misuse is becoming so common that soon everyone will think that I’m the one who is slipping up by using (correctly) me. We can’t have that, now, can we?

The thread notes several examples of how patients and their families can skew medical terms into quite amusing pronunciations, such as "cadillac (cataract) surgery" and "suggestive heart failure." Those things don’t bother me at all. Medicalese is a difficult and complicated language for the uninitiated and I never fault patients or families when they trip over words they rarely use or may never before have heard.

It’s quite another story when I hear nurses and other medical personnel mispronounce medical terms. I am not referring to the occasional twisted tongue kinds of mistakes but the consistent mispronunciation of frequently used terms such as defribrillator (sorry, no r after the f), can-oo-la (canula should be pronounced can-you-la), and phenegran instead of phenergan.

Am I being nit-picky? Maybe. But, nursing is a detail oriented profession. My hearing a nurse bungle common words time and again causes me to think he/she is of the ‘close enough is good enough’ mentality and wonder if that attitude carries over into his/her nursing practice. As one contributor to the thread pointed out, people make judgements based on how we present ourselves and our speech is one component of that presentation.

Does anyone else agree that we should strive for correctness, or do I have a retentive problem? Let me know what you think about this issue. Do you have a pet peeve when it comes to pronunciation?