The Pharmaceutical Industry Discovers the Letter "Q"

The pharmaceutical industry uses computers to generate possible or suggested names for new drugs, and has been doing so for a long time.

The computers are programmed with algorithms so as to respect some of the laws or constraints of English--for example, permitted sequences of letters.

For a long time, it seems, the computers were not allowed to use the letter q in any proposed drug names. In English, the letter q is almost always followed by u (the exceptions are merely a couple of words which come from other languages).

Now, however, that seems to have changed, and we are seeing drug names with q in them:

Rinvoq. Here that final q evidently could be a k or ck.

Cibinqo. Here, although no u follows the q, evidently the pronunciation is just as if the word in fact ended in quo.

Kisqali. Same comment as above.

Qulipta. Evidently this is to be pronounced with the initial syllable being "kew".

Uqora. Here, as with Cobinqo, we evidently need to pretend that there's a qu rather than just q.

It's anybody's guess why the pharmaceutical industry has started using such weird names. Maybe all the good ones have been used already.

Copyright © 2023.

Some Thoughts (Humorous) on American Sports: Team Names, etc.

I was thinking about the names of sports teams. You know, they usually are connected in some way to the city where the team is resident, e.g., Detroit Pistons (referring to the auto industry, with its cars which have--or at least always had--piston engines), the Houston Oilers (there is a lot of oil around Houston). Here are a few new ones that I'm suggesting.

Flushing (Queens, NY) Toilets

Barking (Surrey, U.K.) Dogs

Alaska Glaciers

Maine Lobsters 

Los Vegas Roulette Wheels 

Charleston Chews 

Boston Baked Beans

Seattle Airliners

Wisconsin Dairymen (There is a Wisconsin team known as the Green Bay Packers. I have no idea--and my excuse is that I am not a native of this part of the world--whether there is or ever was any packing going on in Green Bay.)

Some other thoughts related to sports:

I like to say--jokingly, of course--that (Chicago) Cubs grow up to be (Chicago) Bears.

If the (Chicago) White Sox got mixed up in the laundry with the (Boston) Red Sox, you'd get the Pink Sox.

Polo is played on horseback, right? Then I guess sea horses are used for water polo.

There was a basketball player called Meadowlark Lemon. There is a baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. So--although they were on different teams and even different sports--we've had a strawberry and a lemon. Makes me wonder what other fruits[*] there might be…….

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* I strongly want it understood that the use of the word "fruit," though acknowledged as a slang term for a gay person, is in no way meant here to imply any derogatory comment on LGBTQ people.

Copyright (c) 2023

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[*]

SUVs Are Killing Pedestrians

 SUVs keep growing in popularity in America. Also, accidents in which pedestrians are struck by vehicles have been increasing. Now, connect the dots.

What connects the dots is a study that shows that SUVs—and pickup trucks, which are also gaining in popularity—have a significant zone immediately in front of them where something in the road would not be visible to the driver. This is because their hoods are higher.

So, owning and driving an SUV puts pedestrians at greater peril; not to mention the fact that SUVs have a greater impact on the environment. They burn more fuel, on average, than cars and thus emit a greater quantity of greenhouse gases.

The American road is on track to become nearly all SUVs as the major American car makers are dropping their sedan models. There is sort of a push-pull operating here: The car makers claim that buyers demand SUVs, but SUVs are more profitable to build, so auto makers are more than happy to switch their product lines, more and more, to SUVs. You cannot any longer buy a sedan from Ford or Chevrolet, both of which built several good small sedan models.

SUVs are not as popular in Europe. I frankly don't understand why they are so appealing to drivers, but one theory I have is that, as American cars grew smaller (look at, for example, the length of '60s cars and compare that with more recent models), people reacted against that by finding large vehicles in the form of SUVs.

Copyright (c) 2023