Emotional Impact of Bell's Palsy in Children

I read with interest your editorial about swearing. I thought you might be interested in some commonly used Dutch profanities. It may seem unusual for an Australian paediatric rheumatologist of Scottish heritage to have a vast knowledge of profanities in Dutch, but the combination of making lifelong friends with a Dutch family as an adolescent and undertaking a medical elective in orthopaedics in Holland has exposed me to this interesting aspect of Dutch culture. As an expert in the field of infectious diseases, you will be most interested that many Dutch profanities stem from infectious diseases. Tyfus (typhoid fever), tering (tuberculosis), kolere (cholera), pleuris (pleurisy) and pokke (smallpox) are all considered unmentionable profanities. The addition of the word ‘lijer’ or sufferer allows the word to be used an as insult and is roughly analogous to ‘arsehole’. The most severe and shocking of Dutch expletives is the use of the word ‘kanker’ or cancer. The short use of the word, with intonation on the first consonant, is said in the same tone as sh%t. Unfortunately, diseases from within my own subspecialty do not seem to have the same degree of effectiveness. Shouting out ‘lupus’ when one hits one’s thumb with a hammer or insulting someone with a passing ‘Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type 2 Sufferer’ just does not seem to have the same degree of cathartic relief nor level of insult. Given the inappropriateness of these words as expletives in the first place, this is a shortcoming of my subspeciality I am more than happy to accept.