Chapter Twenty
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studies of the abdominal cavity in Polish maintained by the present author,
the equivalent of duct of Wirsung was used 7 times and the equivalent of
pancreatic duct, 6 times, indicating a relatively equal status of both
variants, despite the difference in transparency.
Interestingly, recent medical terms incorporating proper names
eponyms often use names of geographical features, such as the dreaded
Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
the less well known Marburg virus, named after a town in Germany where
exposure to industrial biomaterials from infected monkeys was the cause
of a limited-scale epidemic, or the most recent dread, Zika virus, owing its
name to a forest in Uganda. The reason behind the choice of a toponym as
the distinctive element in the names of the viruses is again conceptual
complexity or the lack of a system of analytical names of viruses. Viruses
do not lend themselves easily to the principles of binominal nomenclature,
so well-established in zoology and botany, since they lack conspicuous
features of outward appearance that have underlain the choice of the
specific element in the names of many animal or plant species.
Importantly, the three viruses do not cause diseases occurring only at
those specific geographical locations, which would actually have made the
terms quite analytical. Their names thus differ in this respect from
toponymic terms referring to certain chronic conditions, such as Balkan
nephritis, the term for a type of kidney disease characteristically affecting
inhabitants of the Balkans and possibly caused by a toxic factor present in
food. The constituent Balkan is more conceptually salient than Marburg.
However, name-derived eponyms have also been coined recently, as
exemplified by Kawasaki disease (1960’s), named after its discoverer.
Terms incorporating alphanumeric symbols
Terms incorporating alphanumeric symbols are the second category of
low-salience terms that is analysed in this chapter. Examples can be found
in various sciences and include Į particle, viral hepatitis A or interleukin
- The symbol may be a Roman script letter, a Greek letter or a number.
Even though terms with symbols carry as little information as
eponymic terms, they have not been up to such criticism as the latter, the
reason being that terms with symbols usually arise late in the lifeline of a
concept.