Quite recently, I requested a colleague to proofread a piece of my writing. When I asked for feedback, his reply through the text bubbles on WhatsApp read: “I have not been chanced to go through it.”
The meaning of it was perfectly clear. Yet I caught myself correcting his sentence almost automatically in my head. Once I caught myself in the act, I stopped abruptly. I found myself wondering whether the way he had formed his sentence was, in fact, accurate and I had simply not been privy to this particular way of using the word “chance,” where it had somehow been turned into a passive act.
I thought it unique and rather clever, but I was also worried about what this meant for my own grasp of the English language, which, admittedly, as the daughter of two English-language educators, I have always taken a subtle pride in. In order to assuage this niggling worry, I resorted to consulting Google about the sentence.
I was told it was not the usual way of expressing that particular meaning in the English I was accustomed to. Further reading suggested it might be a regional usage from a country on the African continent, which also happened to be my colleague’s country of origin.
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Having had my answer and my fears allayed, I decided that the turn and cadence of the sentence was still quaintly adorable. If I ever got around to writing fiction with a character from that part of the world, I thought I might very well borrow the sentence to lend my character some real-life credibility. Having decided this, I committed the sentence to memory and went to bed.
However, my mind refused to cooperate. I found myself thinking about what I would do if I ever borrowed that sentence for a piece of fiction and somebody tried to correct it. The word that came to mind was stet.
Stet itself is a word I discovered only relatively recently. It basically means “let it stand.” It differs by a single vowel from another Latin word commonly used in medicine: stat, meaning immediately. So stet means let something stand, while stat means act now.
As a doctor, I am familiar with stat. It has become as intimate and easy as breathing for me to use. A stat dose of medication. A stat investigation, to be carried out immediately and not at one’s leisure. Stat is so ingrained in my life that I use it even outside work, particularly with friends who are mostly doctors themselves.
As for stet, it stands still. And the difference between the two is massive.
Of course, in medicine, including psychiatry, the field of medicine I practice in, many things might need to be done immediately as circumstances change. Whether it is an urgent risk assessment, a referral for a physically deteriorating patient, or the acute administration of medication to preserve safety, there are plenty of occasions when stat is entirely appropriate.
Yet I found myself connecting both terms back to that one sentence. In my case, familiarity had come disguised as correctness. My ear, accustomed since childhood to a particular form of English, had decided almost immediately that there was a correct version of the sentence. But I found myself asking: why?
In psychiatry, not everything unfamiliar is wrong and not everything unusual is pathological. This is something psychiatrists are forced to think about perhaps more often than we realize. We meet people whose experiences may be very different from our own. We hear beliefs we do not share. We encounter behaviors we do not immediately understand. Sometimes these are symptoms of illness and require treatment. Sometimes they are not.
Culture in particular complicates things. An experience or belief cannot always be interpreted without knowing something about the person who holds it and the context in which that experience exists. Psychiatry has certainly taught me to ask more questions before arriving at conclusions.
Perhaps that was what bothered me about what I had done with my colleague’s sentence. I had understood him perfectly. What had caught my attention was simply that he had said it differently from how I would have said it.
The purpose of an editor is not the same as the purpose of a psychiatrist, of course, and I would be wary of stretching the comparison too far. There are situations in psychiatry where waiting or failing to intervene can have serious consequences. There are people who are acutely unwell, distressed, or at risk, and there are times when action really is required stat. But there are also times when the unfamiliar thing in front of us might first deserve curiosity.
That one WhatsApp sentence reminded me of this in an unexpectedly simple way. My first instinct had been to correct it. My second was to understand it. And after understanding it, somewhat unexpectedly, I wanted to preserve it.
I still do not think I will start telling people that I “have not been chanced” to do things. My own linguistic habits have not undergone quite that dramatic a reformation. But one day, if I do write that fictional character and an editor strikes out the sentence and replaces it with something more conventional, I know what I will write beside the correction.
Stet.
Loshi Rajen is a psychiatrist in the United Kingdom.
