New Lines of Work

A few months back I decided that if I ever needed to sell-out and find another line of work, I would become a linguist for the pharmaceutical industry and sit around all day thinking of ambiguous names for new drugs, using my fascination with language roots and etymology as raw material for the job.

I can imagine the lunch room conversations among the team of brain-stormers: the drug-name-abstraction linguists on one side and the side-effects-minimizing linguists on the other.

Abilify: "I've got a new one that I'm working on that uses 'sanatus' again -- I'm almost there, but I can't quite get it."

May Cause Bleeding Gums: "Have you tried 'sanify'?"

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks about this. I found this link in one of my feeds the other day, about a linguist studying the health effects of the names of cancer drugs.