WHO's "term list"

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Crapulent Syncope - Food Reversal

 

The discussion thus far has used Crapulent Syncope as an example of uselessly

arcane language and Food Reversal as an example of clear modern English. It

should be noted that the two terms do not mean the same thing. Crapulent comes

from the Latin crapula meaning intoxication, Syncope means loss of

consciousness, so the term crapulent syncope means passing out from excess

drinking (or eating by analogy). Food reversal does not explicitly address the

effect on consciousness, but appears to mean that the digestive or metabolic

process has failed, backed up, or reversed.

 

In the current relation between western or bio- medicine and TCM or Classical

, western culture appears to lack any historical awareness

beyond a twenty or fifty year time span. If one accepts that scenario, then of

course terms like crapulent syncope mean virtually nothing.

 

Western Culture, however, with its starts and stops, its gaps, breaks in

tradition, tends to need re-birth, or Renaissance. It falls, as it were, into

syncope, crapulent or otherwise. There are those western herbal traditions (as

well as traditions of cupping, bleeding, needling, body-work, hydrotherapy, and

food medicine) that will come back to life simultaneously with the introduction

of Chinese medicine. Thus old terms like the vocabulary for herbal effects,

carminitive, anti-phlogistic, mucogenic, etc., will come back to life as well.

But these terms did not originate in the Elizabethan age, and are not the

exclusive property of English, but have equivalents and virtually identical

Latin-root cognates in French, Italian, and Spanish. In designing an English

vocabulary for Chinese medicine, should one ignore how Spanish, Italian, and

French are metabolizing the Chinese terms? These languages may tend less to

fall into unconsciousness in matters of nature-based

therapies (as in many other cultural expressions), so their word choices may be

more conservative and evoke deeper medical histories.

 

If we say, oh, English is far ahead of other western languages in translating

Chinese terms, this sense of advantage and primacy needs itself to be

re-evaluated from a standpoint that properly values centeredness, wholeness, and

balance.

 

Carl Ploss

 

 

 

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