It must drive the medics mad!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 July

By which I mean the well-known, supposedly for comic effect, tendency to call some imaginary medical condition Little Red Riding-Hood Syndrome, or Bust-a-Gut Syndrome. (Not that I am linking the two, although I do see a lupine connection...)

All the medics are tutting, if not tee-heeing, at the misuse of one of their trademark dead languages by people who have never read The Comedy of Errors, been to Ephesus, or known a Greek prefix when they saw one*. (Just like the lawyers, jibbing at the allegedly interesting question of knowingly representing someone who's guilty when, in their mind at least, they don't do criminal law - and all these bond deals for which they are providing the late-night know-how are all perfectly innocent.)

As to what planet the makers of the probably wittily titled Synecdoche, New York (2008) transmitted it from, I didn't stay around to find out**. Thank God it didn't infect the UK, giving us Metonymy in Dagenham!

I gather it's the first of a series of iconic new takes on some damn' thing or another, so I'm watching out for Dïaresis Beijing next.



End-notes

* One hopes that everyone's ability to choose to do those things - or ignore them - can continue unabated.

** Courtesy of explanations such as this, no one is danger of finding out what it meant: A synecdoche is a type of trope, which is a figure of speech. When used in literature, a synecdoche will add to the visual imagery of the passage and enhance the reader’s experience.

Yes, so will having a narrator who knows sod all about nothing!


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