Something to remember next time you need surgery

I got a call from my younger brother today that made me stop and think about some of the problems that are endemic in health care.

We all have our areas of specialty. Brian has a degree in computer science. It's generally accepted that we call him for tech support. Herb  is a handyman, so we call him when we need help with our cars. And I think we've all talked with Ward at one point or another about our pets and their proper care,

Meanwhile, I majored in English back in college and have made a career as a writer.

Contrary to what you might expect, I don't get many panicked phone calls from relatives. Shockingly few people face crises where they need a point-by-point comparison of "Troylus and Criseyde," Chaucer's paean to romantic love, with Shakespeare's satirical "Troilus and Cressida" in the next twenty minutes. Nor am I asked to field questions about sentence structure, subject-verb agreement or dangling participles.

In fact, no one in my family has called with a question related to my field of study or choice of career, ever. 

Until now.

Ward, who runs the heart-lung machine during open-heart surgery, called the house around 10 a.m. Monday with a burning question. The surgeon he was working with had been reading an article in The New Yorker, where the writer had used the word coöperate, and the doctor was trying to figure out why the writer had put two dots over the second O. 

He was pretty sure that was called a dipthong, but even so, it was a mystery. 

So Ward called me from the hospital to find out.

Those two dots are properly called an umlaut. When they appear, they signal that the vowel they're attached to is pronounced separately from the vowel before it, so we know to read the word as co-op-er-ate, and not as coop-er-ate. but it's pretty rare to see them in English. 

More broadly, umlauts are a kind of diacritic, a typographical flourish that shows that the letter they're attached to is breaking with conventional pronunciation rules. Diacritics in English most often appear attached to loanwords that come from another (typically European) language and that haven't completely made themselves at home yet.

English by and large has done away with diacritics, umlauts included, in favor of the standard 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. That's why we write fiancee instead of fiancée, facade rather than façade -- and cooperate instead of coöperate.

A dipthong, incidentally, is two vowels that combine to make a single sound, like the oy in boy, or the au in baud.

Having gained the answer he wanted, and -- what's more -- having learned two new words to showboat with, Ward hung up the phone and returned to surgery, where he shared his news.

"I have decided to change my title to perfusiönist for added snob appeal," he later wrote me. "That was the moment of public recognition guys like you wait a lifetime for, and you were a couple states away. Sorry."

Just remember: This is what occupies the minds of your surgeon and her crew when you are on the table.