How quickly the English language evolves these days! I've just emerged from a break of a few months to find a glistening array of new words at my disposal. And because I've been thrown, for my sins, into the company of doctors, I've noticed surprising innovations in the way that indispensable profession chooses to communicate with us. Every message from them seems now to involve the word "triage", pronounced as it would be in France, as though it were a very new arrival in English.
Yet my doctor and his "team" (the fashionable way to refer now to a group of colleagues no matter what the link between them) pepper their directions with "triage" as though we are all intimately familiar with the expression. It was new to me. I looked it up in the late twentieth-century edition of the OED (1979), and it isn't there at all.
Taking the hint from its pronunciation that it's a French word, I find...
Andrew Wilton.
