Our Little Irritations. I think most of us sense them, those petty events that set off little twinges, those inconsequential triggers that blip on our radar and cause us to respond as predictably as Pavlov’s dog (or at least I do) when our bell rings. For me, it’s usually a word, or phrase, that rings my bell.

I’ve thought of this because I’ve been digging into the amazing new evidence that exercise does far more for our health than we knew. Research has demonstrated that our muscles do astonishing things never before imagined. When activated, they secrete peptides and other chemicals that produce healthful changes in our brains, livers, bones, and our muscles themselves. I’ll write about that later, but here I’m focusing on something far less important: my little irritations.

In my reading of muscles I ran across “bicep.” That immediately tinkled my bell, as it has ever since I was a first year medical student. Many people, especially sports writers seem addicted to that word. They huff and puff about injuries to the right bicep, or the left bicep. Apparently they think the ending “s” on biceps denotes a plural, and since they’re writing about only one, they drop the s. Someone should remind them that thousands of singular nouns in the English language end with s (think of stimulus, apparatus, axis). Here are some basics for them: Biceps means that the muscle has two heads, as shown in the diagram below. Also, the muscle on the back of each arm has three heads and hence is called the triceps (which often comes out as tricep). Surprisingly the muscle on the front of our thighs, which has four heads, is more often written correctly as the quadriceps muscle. This issue of course has zero effect on our universe, but it causes little flutters near my diaphragm.

Another bell ringer:

For years I’ve given family members a Merriam Webster Word of the Day Calendar for Christmas, but I changed brands this year. On January 7 (of all days, my birthday, click here for earlier birthday post), the word a day in the new calendar was fulsome. And the definition? Full, abundant, plenteous. What? Impossible! Speaking of sportswriters, some decades ago a former Kansas City Star writer had used fulsome to mean something roughly equal to the new calendar’s definition. Well, I wrote to set him straight, giving him the definition in my  American Heritage Dictionary: New College Edition, copyright 1980. “1. Offensively excessive or insincere. 2. Offensive to the senses; loathsome; disgusting.”

The sportswriter wrote back. He had found the fourth or fifth definition is some dictionary to be consistent with his usage, a definition that obviously had arisen because some people had stumbled upon the word, fulsome, and, not knowing its true meaning, broke down its parts and decided the word had to mean something good. I realize of course that the meaning of words can change over time (click here for examples), sometimes fairly quickly, but fulsome, when used to mean abundant and plenteous, still rings my bell.

Most of us have our little irritations. Do you? Is so, what rings your bell? I, and other readers, would like to know.