I’ve known the word placebo [effect] a long time (though I only recently learned its origins). Then a few years ago I learned about its opposite, nocebo effect, in which people report ill effects from what should be something that’s benign.
Just this week I learned yet another related term: the lessebo effect. This can occur in studies where some participants are given a placebo. On the effect scale, so to speak, lessebo is between placebo (improvement despite no positive intervention) and nocebo (decline despite no negative intervention). Lessebo describes “reduction of therapeutic benefit due to the uncertainty of being allocated to placebo,” as one page puts it. Participants don’t know whether they have a placebo, so their uncertainty has a measurable effect on how well their therapy works. I guess we can think of it as a physiological “I have my doubts” reaction.
This word seems to have been coined around 2013 for a study of treatments for Parkinson’s disease. I am mostly pleased by the construction. Placebo, as I learned, is a verb in Latin: “I shall be pleasing.” Nocebo breaks off the -cebo part as a “liberated infix,” or libfix, and adds no- as a negative particle. To describe an effect somewhere between the two, but trending negative, you use less- and add it to the -cebo libfix (with some spelling fixup). My only objection is that lessebo isn’t a particularly transparent term; you need to see a definition before the construction makes sense. Still, clever.
Update: In an ironic twist that I swear was not intentional, Twitter user Jamie points out that my (intuition-based) analysis of the origins of nocebo is incorrect. To quote Jamie, “It’s from Latin ‘nocere’ on the same pattern as placebo.” Heh. However, I stand by my analysis of how lessebo came to be, perhaps with bated breath, waiting to hear that that, too, is based on Latin. 🙂
Moving on. Today’s word origins came about indirectly. Friend Karen posted this on Twitter:
For a moment I thought she was saying that spatula came from Yiddish. This sent me to the dictionary immediately, where I learned that no, spatula is not from Yiddish. And when I re-read the tweet, I realized she wasn’t saying that at all.
But ok, where does spatula come from? For the purposes of English, it comes from Latin, perhaps not surprisingly. The original was spatha; spatula is a diminutive. The Romans got the word from Greek. The term has always referred to a thing with a broad, flat part.
I think of a spatula as a piece of kitchen equipment. But there are spatulas in medicine as well. And the word spathe appears in botany to describe the sheath-like part of a flower, as in calla lilies. You might also have guessed about another word that’s related to spatula: a spade, as in a shovel.
Anyway, Karen’s remark resonated with me because I, too, have thought that a word must have originated in whatever—Latin, German, Italian. If you’ve followed the Friday words, you’ll remember me being wrong with guesses like these (for example, I might have guessed that moxie is from Yiddish). But once you look it up, you discover that your guess (or certain knowledge) isn’t right. It’s a good thing we have so many great resources for correcting our intuitions.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.