It’s a Grey Area…
Pictured Above: McSkelety
The other night, I actually had the television on, and while flipping through the channel guide to see just how much wasn’t worth watching, I noticed Grey’s Anatomy. To be honest, I had kind of forgotten that show existed. I think I was probably better off before.
But it got me to wondering: After six seasons and countless combinations of whiny doctor sex, I wonder how many people watching realize that the title is a play upon the classic medical reference text, Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, otherwise known as Gray’s Anatomy? I’m betting on “not that many” since a quick Google image search for the correct spelling of the textbook yields one image of the book for every twenty of the soap-opera. What a poor fate for a work that’s been in continual use since 1858. And of the people who are aware of the seminal medical text, how many do you think actually watch the show? Seems like a waste of a pun to me.
And really, why are there two ways to spell gray/grey anyway?
sorry i missed the fun readings. glad youre alive now finally. i’ve never seen gray’s anatomy.
Alive yes. Almost kicking. Let’s see.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even make it to Missassauga one of these days.
Shouldn’t that me McMusclely? (Muscly?)
The grey/gray scheme comes from the color/colour deal. The Yanks wanted to be different from the Brits so they changed up dozens/hundreds of words. (Or so I’ve been led to believe)
Indeed sir. I chose McSkelety because I thought any way you tried to spell McMuscly looked weird.
As for grey/gray you are again correct. As Canadians, we should be on the grey side of the aisle. Which I am actually. Gray generally looks funny to me.
Although, I’ve recently discovered that early Americans trying to be different for the sake of nation-building wasn’t as black and white as I thought (grey). Apparently the spelling changes introduced by the nationalistic board weren’t all that popular and only a few stuck. So really, the differences in language are better explained as American English not taking on any new developments in British English since… well, since then.
Thank goodness the word-list didn’t take completely. Check out some of the original suggestions from Wikipedia:
The Board’s initial list of 300 words was published on April 1, 1906. Much of the list included words ending with -ed changed to end -t (“addressed”, “caressed”, “missed”, “possessed” and “wished”, becoming “addresst”, “carest”, “mist”, “possest” and “wisht”, respectively). Other changes included removal of silent letters (“catalogue” to “catalog”), changing -re endings to -er (“calibre” and “sabre” to “caliber” and “saber”), changing “ough” to “o” to represent the long vowel sound in the new words altho, tho and thoro, and changes to represent the “z” sound with that letter, where “s” had been used (“brasen” and “surprise” becoming “brazen” and “surprize”)
HA! The McMuscly thing is kinda creepy. Get out of my head!
The -t ending makes sense. Of course, pretty much everything else in that list survived. Although (see what I did there) had a renaissance/resurrection as ‘altho’ with the internet and it’s wacky abbreviations/shortenings.
Grey’s Anatomy sucks =/. I’ve never seen a more useless show in my life. Couldn’t bear it after the first episode! Lame -.-
Gray’s Anatomy, on the other hand, has another myth associated with it. They say that it is a “cursed” book. Mr. Gray dissected his mother’s body and wrote. Utter bullshit I’m guessing
I passed anatomy because of Mr. Gray!!! Yehaw!