Plumbum oscillans (or swinging the lead)

Webword today blogs a news report on The secret world of doctors' slang, covering the launch of a new dictionary of these inventive and often insulting terms, written by Adam Fox, a specialist registrar at St. Mary's Hospital in London.

As Fox says in the news report, such shorthand can serve to "depersonalise the distress encountered in doctors' everyway working lives". It may also act as a code that is not decipherable by patients in these days of increasing access to - increasingly electronic - medical records.

I don't know if it's in Mr Fox's new dictionary, but my own favourite term, seemingly widely used in British hospitals, is PIP, or pyjama-induced paralysis: that strange languor that overtakes the person who never manages to change into their day clothes.