Life-Alysis. Is this really necessary?

The Clam Rampant posted Life-Alysis Friday which expanded on a post from last October that was recently commented on by Rachel. First the original post:

euphemisms reach new heights in lunacy: at Warren and Conner there is actually a “Life-alysis Center”. I ask you, how ignorant do you have to be to be frightened of the word “dialysis”?

Which sparked Rachel's recent comment:

Using the term “life-alysis” isn’t so much of a euphemism as it is a state of mind.  If you’ve ever actually experienced dialysis you would understand how exhausting, how frightening, how draining the whole thing can be.  So some centres in the States have switched their names to Life-Alysis Centres in order to help patients change their thinking…because positive thinking is 90% of the battle in any illness.

Perhaps a little bit more understanding and empathy on your part is needed.

To which TCR responded:

What I was reacting to was the replacement of the Greek prefix “di-” with the word “life”, thinking that people were irrationally reacting to it and refusing to get life-sustaining treatment because they incorrectly associated it with the English word “die”.

Life-Alysis is fine with me so long as long as it is recognized that Life-Alysis is a dialysis center. The etymology of dialysis according to Wikipedia is from the Greek διάλυσις, dialusis (dissolution), from διά, dia (through) + λυσις, lusis (loosening) rather than from δι- (di-) twice. This makes sense considering there isn't anything fundamentally binary about dialysis and the process was discovered and named long before there was a medical procedure.

The idea that it sounds as if the word die is an integral part of the word dialysis has been remarked upon over the years but I can't believe it's an issue. There are bigger renal lexicon fish to fry. At the top of that list would be some of the other terms for stage 5 CKD e.g. end stage renal disease, renal failure. I'd prefer to think of myself as a stage 5 dialyzor rather than as an end stage failure.

Comments

[Kasia]

Thanks for the correction on the etymology. I will update the post to include a link to this post.

I'll admit that I did not even look into the etymology of the word, instead recognizing it as Greek and assuming it used a common Greek prefix. Mea maxima culpa. :-)

(I didn't intentionally take this long to respond - this post just popped up in my 'recent links' box, and I didn't know about it before.)