We think using words.

The choice and arrangement of words form our thoughts and ideas.

These are two well understood concepts that we learn in childhood become tools that we forget we use. Less well understood is that our words are constructed by thoughts and our thoughts and ideas are constructed by the arrangement of words.

When we study new languages it becomes clear that some cultures have words for an idea, feeling, nuance or even a noun that does not exist in our own. Such words tend to jump from the nest language into the world of other languages, such as email, weekend, zeitgeist, bon appetite.

My interest is going to focus in this essay, on how paired words influence our thoughts. I will use three well known paired words common in the United Kingdom.

The first is ‘drugs and alcohol’. Many public and voluntary organisations concerned with public health, law and social cohesion, mental health and education use this pairing of words. What is revealing is that alcohol is a drug. The question introduced by slicing alcohol away from the ‘drug’ label is, why? Alcohol is a known harmful drug. When Professor David Nutt published his research on the social harm of drugs in the medical publication The Lancet*, he classified alcohol as fifth down the list of the most harmful drugs to individuals and society. If it were to be classified under the 1971 Drugs Act it would have been given a Class A rating; that is the highest possible.

Instead, alcohol is legal in the United Kingdom and many Western style countries. There are certainly historical reasons for the tolerance of this drug as being easy to produce from almost any plant, and was consumed in times when clean drinking water was not available. Like so many discoveries, once found it is impossible to prohibit as the United States discovered in the early twentieth century.

In my view however, alcohol should not be seperated by the phrase ‘drugs and alcohol’, as if it were somehow a benign drug.

Less controversially is ‘Fire and Rescue’. In the United Kingdom, if you are involved in a collision on a road and need to be cut out of your car, this will be done by ‘Firemen’ and of course ‘Firewomen’. If I were hanging upside down by my seat belt with blood dripping from my forehead, I think this aberration of thought through incorrect use of a noun would be more disturbing to me than my prognosis of recovery. How can we send fire fighting specialists to collisions on the highways where there is no fire? At least half of all ‘call outs’ to the Fire Brigade in the United Kingdom are to these type of incidents. This was recognised at least in part by the innovation of adding the word ‘Rescue’ to the title of the Fire and Rescue Service. I would argue however that carrying victims from burning buildings is a ‘rescue’ by any definition. I have heard of fire service personnel donning their breathing apparatus designed for entering smoke filled buildings and walking into a lake to rescue persons in difficulties in the lake. Again, this is a rescue. To foreshorten the argument, all activities of the Fire and Rescue service are ‘rescues’ just like the Thunderbird puppets who operate International Rescue. Once the thought blockage is removed by removing the word ‘fire’ from their title, the Rescue Service will be trained and equipped to tackle any incident where humans are in immediate danger of injury or death.

Lastly, the third unnecessary pairing of words in a title I wish to highlight is ‘Accident and Emergency‘. These hospital departments are placed under increasing pressure in the United Kingdom, particularly at times of high demand such as the winter. So serious has this pressure become that patients lie on trolleys in hospital corridors with ambulance staff, waiting to be triaged and treated. If the staff in these departments were asked how these numbers could be reduced I expect many would say that non-urgent patients should not be attending their departments. They could go to their local doctor’s surgery or even a pharmacist for simple and fast treatment.

My point here is that the title Accident and Emergency is misleading to the public. Clearly the department is there only for emergency patients, not necessarily for those involved in accidents – what ever they might be. The cause of the need for emergency treatment is, I would argue, irrelevant. An emergency can be the result of something that was not an accident, like a heart or asthma attack or fit. The use of the word ‘accident’ is giving permission for patients to attend an emergency department when their injury is not life threatening. By redirecting these patients to other services and professionals and funding this extra demand on them, the Emergency Departments will run more efficiently with less unnecessary stress on staff and patients.

As thinkers, we tend to become lazy and adopt historical phrases as normal, long after the logic of their original inspiration.

Think then of all the other neural pathways we adopt through life and never challenge. Life started when we as humans became separate from animals as thinkers. We will progress the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens when our thoughts intiate pathways to new ways of thinking and being.

We might start by no longer tolerate hanging around in hospital corridors, expect to be saved by a rescuers and think ‘drug’ before we have ‘a drink’.