The Yorkshire Vet: The impact of lazy letters and language...

Already, I was riled by its tone. Very many of my emails start with “Hi”, but I reserve this for people that I actually know, or at least contacts with whom I have had regular or previous positive interactions.

The content of the message got more irritating still, as the next line asked if said recruiting team was “having a great day!” There was worse to come.

Phrases such as “I’m reaching out to yourselves”, had me reaching out for the “delete” button before I’d even opened the documents to read the curriculum vitae of the poor candidate, whose chance of a job, thanks to the inability of the agency to write a proper email, was already close to zero.

The smattering of semi-colons, scattered liberally around the second half of the missive did little to save the situation. Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) would have been furious and Clive James turning in his grave.

Nowadays, facing such a terribly annoying letter, we don’t even get the satisfaction of screwing it up and throwing it in the wastepaper bin. Clicking a rubbish bin icon (or “trashcan”- also annoying) is not nearly so cathartic.

By nature, I’m not a pedant. Anyone who has read my clinical notes at work will confirm this.

And I totally love the evolution of language and wait with bated breath (a phrase from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which has stood the test of time for over four hundred years, without any evolution at all) for the Word of the Year to be announced.

Last year, it was “rizz”, a slang word derived from “charisma”. I even use it on odd occasions, much to the amusement of my lads.

But I find the corruption of language through laziness particularly irksome. A pet hate at the moment, is the ubiquitous use of the word “impact” as a verb. According to my dictionary, the correct way to use this word is this: to make an impact upon.

The dictionary does have a footnote which acknowledges its usage has evolved, partly because of business jargon (which, the dictionary notes, makes it doubly disliked).

In its own right, “impact” is a verb of course, but the one I have been brought up with, having spent six years at vet school and then twenty-eight years in practice, usually refers to something catastrophic happening in a colon (an actual one, not a semi- one), a pelvic flexure or an anal gland.

A common cause of colic in a horse is “impaction of the pelvic flexure”, where a u-bend in the huge large intestine gets full of compressed fibrous food; it becomes impacted.

It is possible to feel this by performing a rectal examination. The cure is effected using a long tube, passed up the nose via which a bucket of liquid paraffin and Epsom salts is administered.

Solving impacted anal glands in a dog is simpler, involving a shorter glove, some lubricant gel and some cotton wool with which to catch the smelly contents of each gland.

This is typically quite watery but can be pasty like toothpaste, or (if they are impacted) more solid or inspissated and dry. If impacted anal glands are not treated correctly, they can burst or turn into an abscess.

If a colon becomes impacted, for example, it becomes obstructed by solid concretions of faeces. We see this in cats, when the condition develops into something called a “megacolon”, which is as dramatic as it sounds.

Un-clogging an impacted colon in a constipated cat is certainly one of the most unpleasant jobs for a vet. Semantics aside, it never fails to have an impact!