Dental Linguistics

“Schadenfreude” is one of my favorite words. It’s not the shapes and sounds of the word itself, or even the feeling it names, that makes me such a fan of it as much as it is a love for the fact that there’s a word for such a weirdly complex set of emotions. It’s the possibility it offers, that there’s an entire dictionary out there for equally long-winded emotional responses, that captures my attention and my love; I love the idea of this emotional language that names all the things we struggle to put into words any other way.

Somewhere in that book, there’s a word for the feeling that bubbles up inside you when your new dentist tells you that that expensive root canal + crown combination that you spent thousands of dollars and quite a few hours on last year that actually resulted from a botched filling that left all manner of bacteria in your tooth was itself botched by the same (former) dentist, and that you may have to go through it all again because they did such a half-ass job and what remains of said tooth is still, in fact, riddled with decay.

I asked new dentist whether this was the kind of thing that I could demand old dentist (a) apologized or (b) actually paid for inevitable expensive new surgery, and she just looked at me, visibly not answering honestly, saying nothing for almost a minute before saying, “It’s people like that that make dentists look bad.”

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