Sometimes we don’t have the professional vocabulary to describe certain common counseling situations or patient experiences. So, as a service to my genetic counseling colleagues, I offer the below terms, acronyms, groaners, and neologisms to fill in some of the gaps in our lexicon. A few have nothing to do with genetics but I thought I’d claim author’s prerogative and include them anyway.
Roomba Session – A genetic counseling session with a patient whose thoughts, questions, and concerns are expressed in a stream of consciousness, non-linear fashion, jumping in a seemingly random manner from topic to topic, like a robot vacuum cleaner (hoover, for UK readers) pinballing around your living room floor. The apparent randomness is usually a function of the genetic counselor’s viewpoint; to patients, their comments and questions make perfectly logical sense (To raise a tangential paradox, if someone describes a vacuum cleaner by saying “It really sucks!” does that mean the device is a really good vacuum or a really bad vacuum?).
Portrait Session or Rembrandt Session – A genetic counseling session with impassive patients who never change their facial expression, i.e., like they are sitting for a portrait. They speak occasionally and then only in short non-emotional statements or “Mmmhmms,” despite your best efforts to engage them in meaningful dialogue with open-ended questions and probing statements. You never quite know where you stand with them or what they got out of your time together.
Gene Selfie – When healthy consumers undergo exome or genome sequencing without a clinical indication, just to see what their genes look like, and then share it with everyone on their social media accounts.
MTPNTUS – Acronym for Maybe This, Possibly Not That, Uncertain Significance. What many consumers learn about their hereditary disease risks from a gene selfie.
SOTSOT – Acronym for Some of This, Some Of That. What many consumers learn about their mixed ancestry after undergoing DNA-based ancestry testing, e.g., some German, some English, some French, a little bit of Neanderthal.
“I just got my Hominin Ancestry DNA results and I found out that I am 25% Denisovan! My father would be so upset if he knew – he thought they were an evolutionary dead end. And in a hundred thousand years my descendants will be 25% Irish, 30% Germanic, 25% Slavic, 18% Spanish, and 2% Ashkenazi Jewish. And Genghis Khan will have 5% of my DNA.”
Man-cestry Testing – Ancestry testing based on Y chromosome markers.
Manicure – Ridding a man of obnoxious common male habits and behaviors like manspreading and mansplaining (for the women reading this, let me explain what these terms mean …..).
Circumvent – The parental decision to avoid having their son circumcised. Among Jews, this can be much to the chagrin of mohels and mohalots.
There are two experiences that occur during the simple act of walking that are common occurrences in all of our lives and yet there are no words for them in the English language. The first of these is when two people, often strangers, are walking towards each other from opposite directions on the same side of the street or hallway. When they get close, they both maneuver in mirror-image to each other, simultaneously sidling in the same mirror-image direction several times to avoid walking into each other. It is often followed by the question “Shall we dance?” The motor vehicle equivalent occurs when two cars arrive simultaneously at right angles to each other at a 4-way Stop. Both cars inch out at the same time, then continue to stop and start synchronously, until one driver finally gives up and signals with either a hand wave or a flashing of headlights for the other driver to go first.
The other unnamed common experience is the uncanny ability of slow-walking people to obliviously occupy all the available walking space such that it is impossible to walk around them without bumping into them or seriously breaching their personal space. I have found it to be common in hospital hallways, where I often encounter several families members walking 3 or 4 abreast, like an O-line trying to prevent the defense from tackling the quarterback. The frequency of such encounters in hallways and streets has dramatically increased over the last decade because nearly everybody is looking at or talking into their smartphones while walking. Nothing against walking slowly; we all walk at our own comfortable paces. Just do so with a sense of awareness of the world around you.
Do any of the Good Readers of the DNA Exchange have suggestions for terms to describe these latter two phenomena? How about terms for other common but unnamed genetic counseling experiences?
Yet again, many thanks to Emily Singh for help with graphics.
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