Medical Misspelling?

By Anne Curzan. This past weekend I received an email asking if I might comment on a heated debate about spelling at a School of Medicine. The email came from a professor in the “Department of Orthopaedic Surgery”—and I use quotes here because the spelling matters. The spell checker in Microsoft Word puts a red squiggly line under orthopaedic. It prefers orthopedic, and that’s the crux of the problem. The department is fighting to retain the “a” in orthopaedic, in the face of a higher-level administrative decision to lose the “a” and refer to the department as orthopedic. From the department’s perspective, orthopaedic is the only “correct” spelling. More...