Tylenol

The other day, I was at my grandfather’s house reading my cousin Laurel’s blog. She was right behind me, gauging my reactions to what she had written.

Laurel doesn’t like punctuation or paragraphs (although you can still understand her without it), and I was kind of helping her a bit by fixing the most obvious errors and pointing out where paragraphs should have been made.

While I was reading her post of 02 July entitled “Hospital,” I got to a part where she mentioned taking Tylenol to reduce her pains. She laughed and admitted that when she was writing it, she wasn’t sure how to spell Tylenol and had to look at the bottle so that she would type it correctly.

“It looked weird in that font,” she told me, “but I was right.”

The misspelling of medicine names is a problem. At least Laurel decided to use the brand name Tylenol and not the generic acetaminophen (that could’ve been scary).

There are too many medicines in the world, and too few letters in the alphabet with which to spell their names. This is such an epidemic that sometimes a drug’s name gets very close to being replicated by something else. There are only so many combinations of letters you can form into pronounceable words before they get so long they look like German.

Imagine some random guy is walking down the street. He has an asthma attack, and a vigilant passerby rushes him to the Emergency Room. After getting him back to normal, the doctor says that the man needs Singulair, and writes it on the prescription pad.

Two weeks later, the man suffers another attack. When the doctor asks about his earlier advice, the man rants and raves, wondering why the doctor is so insistent that he should change his wireless telephone company to Cingular! (Yes, there are people that brainless!)

So, there are two possible solutions: less drugs, or more letters. Less drugs won’t work; there are many medicines that do wonders for the ailing body, and more research will only produce more drugs. Thus, we need more letters! What these letters could be, though, I don’t know.

I’d like to buy a vowel.