This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zoltzman, hope language doesn't fall in with a bad crowd.

Coming up, your annual epinim's episode.

On with the show.

Previously on the Allusionist.

Epinim, now a word or name derived from the name of a person.

Or a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc. is named.

Silhouette, leotard, bakerlight, fallopian tubes, saxophone, sousophone.

An epinim, just almost by definition, has some kind of story.

Even if it isn't the origin story, it has something where it got the epinim attached to it.

Which is a good enough story to be retalled.

And so for that reason, I kind of love them and it starts a good conversation, I think.

That's where I love my epinim's.

That was Roman Mars, progenitor of radio topia, host of 99% Invisible, and epinim fan.

But here's some bad news for him.

There's a shift, a gradual shift away from using epinim's in medicine.

Who's this enemy of epinim's?

My name's Isaac Siemens, and I'm a resident physician in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto.

There's two camps in medicine currently.

People who want to use epinim's and people who want to move away from epinim's.

And there's a few different reasons for that.

People that are more in touch with history perhaps, and then people that are more moving towards kind of accuracy in language.

In broad strokes, that's the controversy.

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