Early this morning, your host found it necessary to travel to a hospital to visit a relative suddenly stricken ill. Fortunately, all will be well, but this precluded the usual SC schedule. However, the correspondence of silver linings and clouds continues to hold up reasonably well, and even in a hospital, your host could find a linguistic point of interest.
As background, in many hospitals, the departments are referred to not only by their formal titles (oncology, obstetrics, radiology, etc.), but by floor number and compass direction. SC is not entirely sure that the compass directions are always in fact consonant with exterior maps, but they are generally at least internally consistent, and so he can count on 2 North being directly below 3 North, and 3 East being oriented in a different direction than both of those.
In the lobby of the hospital were a set of posters indicating the hospital's near-term expansion plans. As a consequence of these plans, a number of existing departments will relocate to new floors. Rather than referring to the departments by name, though, the posters bore labels such as "5 North will be moving to the 6th floor". This raises the question of whether the labels are intended to be rigid designators, and thus will follow the departments to their new floors, or whether they will be applied to new departments as appropriate.
Not wishing to be seen as a wise guy ([except here, apparently -- ed.]), SC did not inquire about this at the reception desk. He will guess, though, that in fact the departments will acquire new names, in order to preserve the conventional meanings for people who were not present during the transition. It might, however, be interesting to be able to record some dialogues and see if the staff adapts to the remapping of labels to departments as fast as people apparently can in other contexts.
I hope those plans would be achieved!
James Ferris
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Does any one know why there is a Saint in most Hospital Names
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