What has become of good manners?

I type for medical doctors as you will know from reading prior posts on my Blog. This morning I am reminded of how often people fail to phone a doctor's office to notify them that they are not going to be able to make it to a scheduled appointment. It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this, but some people seem to feel no responsibility to do so.

An even worse scenario is when someone no-shows for surgery. This is a problem that affects all of society with the long wait times being an issue that many of us are concerned about in British Columbia. Nothing is mentioned by the sensation-seeking media about this issue.

When someone fails to phone to cancel or rearrange an appointment, it affects all of us negatively. It makes a fit-in appointment for another patient impossible, thus cheating another potential patient of his/her chance to get medical help. It cheats the doctor of his valuable time, as he can do nothing much to fill in that time. I suppose he or she can make a phone call or shuffle papers, but it is very annoying to have one's time wasted in this way.

I hear people commenting that doctors "double-book" appointments, which is, in fact, a falsehood. I have never seen a doctor do this. What they do it book appointments for 10 minutes each, as many problems do not require more than 10 minutes. A good diagnostician can diagnose a problem after a few brief questions are answered and a quick exam is done. He/she can prescribe treatment very rapidly - be in a lab test, an x-ray, a quick in-office procedure, or a prescription for a drug or ointment. If more time is needed, the doctor will reschedule a followup appointment that will last from 10 to 20 or 30 mintues according to the need.

Patients who no-show and do not have the courtesy to phone either before or after the failure to attend a medical appointment have no excuse. If their reason was beyond their control, it doesn't take much effort to phone or drop by to explain why they did not attend and to apologise for the inconvenience caused to others.

Another acceptable way to phrase "looks to be"

There is another way that "looks to be" can be rewritten. One could write it "looks like" blah, blah, blah........

What's with this phrase "looks to be"?

I think I have ranted here before. This phrase is driving me crazy! What happened to "appears to be"? I am curious as to how the word looks replaced the word appears. Look is an action verb. So how does a person "look to be"? Is it an action that one performs? No it is not!

The verb "be" is a state of being verb, which means it just is...... We are doing the looking, not the item we are looking at, yet the phrase "looks to be" is actually stating that the item that looks is the item being discussed. For example if we say the scar "looks to be" healed, when taken literally, we are stating that the scar is doing the looking and it is looking to see that it is healed (looking at itself) and discovering that it is healed! Duh!

Language does evolve and it is often a movie line or a news journalist or commentator that first uses an unusual phrase and it takes off from there.

I remember in the early 1980s the phrase "at this point in time" became in vogue. All the newscasters were using it. Prior to that time, no one used that phrase frequently. Our electrician was working on my dishwasher when I used this phrase in a conversation with him. He quickly cut me off and said "you mean now." I asked him why he had corrected me like that. He said, the phrase "at this point in time" was being overused and it annoyed him. I became more aware of how quickly catch phrases take off and how they often do nothing to improve meaning in language.

Comments anyone?