Mind your language
`I CAN'T help what the dictionary says,' my husband exclaimed, standing in the doorway. 'That's what it says in the literature.'
By 'literature' he meant medical jour- nals — as ladies in Burnley call Woman's Realm a 'book'. The thing he couldn't help was, I am afraid, micturition.
It ought to be simple. The English word micturition derives from the Latin verb micturire, meaning 'to desire to make water'. (There is a related Latin verb mingere, 'to make water'.) From the present participle (in the accusative, micturientem) of micturire came the English adjective micturient, meaning `desirous of making water'; this is obso- lete, more's the pity.
Pretty soon after micturition came into English in the 18th century (although a Latin equivalent had been used by English doctors for hundreds of years) it was employed catachrestically, that is, wrongly. It was used as a synonym for urination. Worse, a back-formation appeared in the 19th century, of which the Oxford English Dictionary remarks laconically, 'The sense is incorrect as well as the form.' This was the verb micturate.
The Lancet, in 1842, took half-edu- cated doctors to task for the barbarous micturate: 'Another, in a long-winded phrase, tells us that his patient "desires to micturate".' It was no good — 120 years later, the Lancet for 11 August 1962 (which I pulled out of a horrible fluff-ridden pile, while my husband was off drinking with doctor chums who should know better) carried the follow- ing sentence: 'Commonly the story is that the patient was asleep, was roused by a desire to micturate, and fainted when the bladder was almost or com- pletely emptied.'
This article is often quoted in discus- sions of syncope (syncope is 'a brief and transitory loss of consciousness due to impairment of the cerebral circulation' — a kind of fainting). In Diseases of the Nervous System (billed on the title page as being 'revised by the late Lord Brain') the 1962 Lancet article is quoted as an authority on `micturition syncope'. But, as even the late Lord Brain makes clear, micturition (in the proper sense) does not cause fainting; a desire to uri- nate often raises blood pressure. Only the emptying of the bladder causes a rapid fall in blood pressure, a loss of blood supply to the brain, and fainting.
It is the usual story. Once the cat.- achrestic meaning takes hold, It becomes unsafe to use the proper sense, lest it be misunderstood. But try telling my husband that.
Dot Wordsworth
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