1571 Breve Tea

I go down the rabbit hole of words and phrases sometimes, getting tripped up and falling into a topsy-turvy world of miscommunication.
Like the other day, I was in a meeting and one of the folks there said he was going to add some brevity to the discussion.
How do you add brevity? The ultimate brevity is nothing at all. So if you are adding brevity you are actually subtracting longevity. Kind of one of those two negatives make a positive sort of things. But not in this case because the more brevity you add the shorter things get. Maybe he should have not spoken up at all.
Unless he was talking about inventing a new Starbucks drink. Kind of like a chai latte. The Breve Tea.
Not long after that, I was at the dentist and had to have a tooth extracted. "Extracted"...sounds so much better than "yanked out."
One of the cool things about my extraction was the modified pair of pliers the dentist used to do it. Straight out of the dark ages, but polished and autoclaved of course. Still, nice to see a tool from a tradition that stretches back for eons. Makes you feel so much a part of the circle of life.
But what got me was what they told me afterward for the care of my extraction site. I was to keep a piece of gauze in place for a while, then make sure I didn't swish or suck from a straw. Otherwise, they told me, I would get the dread "dry socket".
Really? "Dry Socket?" Isn't there a more impressive sounding name? Two millennia of tooth pulling, Greek, Latin, German, what have you—the best we can do is "dry socket?"
Oh well. At least it has a lot of brevity.
America, ya gotta love it.