When I began as a medical student on the wards, I discovered that there was a word that physicians almost never used. In fact, they often played elaborate language games to avoid it. My first encounter with this occurred one night on call. The resident and I were eating dinner in the cafeteria when he got a page. He excused himself saying, "I need to go declare a patient ..." I remember thinking, "You need to ‘declare’ a patient ... what?" He avoided saying that he was going to declare a patient dead.
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