Comments on: Dentists, Design and Dumbing Down

By: jonathan law

jonathan law — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:43:15 +0000

These are terrific synonyms: ‘fang-farrier’ and ‘jawsmith’ sound like something Gerard Manley Hopkins might have come up with:

Dr Randall, the fang-farrier, Oh is he dead then?…

Indeed, ‘GMH goes to the dentist’ would be a superb topos for Frank Key, don’t you think?

The dentist who haunted my childhood and teenage years was a morose bearded Yorkshireman named Kershaw, who may or may not be still alive. He had a nice way of getting his probes and burs and pluggers into your mouth and then coming out with a lot of belligerent stuff that you felt obliged to try to contradict but were of course splutteringly unable to. Knowing that I was at Oxford, he always came up with some choice material about overprivileged parasites wasting their time and taxpayers’ money studying things like the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In fact this wasn’t so stupid: whether designedly or not, it took your mind off the pain and fear like nothing else.

By: malty

malty — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:54:51 +0000

There are, I am reliably informed, in excess of one thousand dentists in the Köln metropolitan area, population circa 1.2 million. One of them, a friend of a friend, has sold her city practice and moved into the same street as Gerhard Richter in the Hahnwald area. In the hope of one day sitting in the waiting doom next to himself, I shall be pleading for a place on her client list. I am now living out this fantasy, Gerhard asks me for the X-Ray, overpaints it and calls it ‘Ohne Titel’. It is on permanent display in Bonn’s Kunstmuseum (museum of modern German art) next to his Baader Meinhof series. My Hampsteads, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof (deceased) what a combination.

By: John Halliwell

John Halliwell — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:50:19 +0000

“Open up, you cowering little scumbag!” The school dentist didn’t quite use those words but he made little effort to disguise the contempt he felt for the umpteenth kid he’d terrorised that day. It was that damned drill; a slow turner, as JG recalls, with no anaesthetic, not even a smile from Doctor Death’s female assistant, that inflicted most misery. And this was a decade and more after Barnes-Wallis had developed a bouncing bomb. Where were the equivalent developments in dental technology: the drill that revolved half a million times per minute and which, on landing, leapt over the contours of a decaying molar, mapping the area of putrefying grunge, before blasting the crap out of it, all in the blink of an eye, and then turning for home to the bracket by the door? It would have been known as The Guy Gibson; kids would have flocked to be drilled by it.

By: Joey Joe Joe Jr.

Joey Joe Joe Jr. — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:07:57 +0000

I fear you’re not alone in your scepticism Susan – at any rate both products have yet to make an appearance in my local Asda. From what I recall the egg cooker had flexible heating pads which would mould themselves to the shape and size of the egg in question. The egg would then be “boiled”, in the sense that the end product looked like a boiled egg. I thought it was an ~~excellent~~ splendid idea but, alas, the demonstration failed, made a bit of a mess, and the inventor left with egg, if not on his face, then down his shirt-front.

By: Mr Slang

Mr Slang — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:23:26 +0000

Some slang dentists: fang bandit, fang carpenter, fang man, fang faker, fang-farrier, fang hustler, fang-lifter, gum-digger, gum-puncher, gum-smasher, gum-tickler, ivory-carpenter, ivory-snatcher, jawsmith, jawbreaker, jawcracker, jaw-twister. jawbone breaker, jawbone doctor, jawbuster, jaw puller, tooth carpenter.

By: Mr Slang

Mr Slang — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:13:19 +0000

‘Obscenity littered jabbering’: that’s my profession you’re talking about.

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:04:34 +0000

Hmmm… perhaps we should get Mr Slang onto dental phraseology.

And how about the scent of ‘discovery’, Worm?

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:55:41 +0000

Curiously inventive stuff, but hasn’t plastic on the end of a cucumber kind of been done in the form of clingfilm? A water free egg boiler? Doesn’t boiling involve water or another form of liquid? Is heating eggs an entirely new concept?

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:46:57 +0000

Thanks Jonathon, you’ve rekindled fond memories of ‘experimental’ root canal treatment on one of my milk teeth – aged about 6. The South African dentist threatened to strap me to the chair if I didn’t stop screaming. And the Michael Jackson drug – I had some of that when my broken nose was fixed. I wasn’t so well behaved afterwards, though the nursing staff seemed amused by my obscenity littered jabbering…

By: Brit

Brit — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:30:35 +0000

I love my dentist, in a Stockholm Syndrome type way. He is a kind and gentle torturer who only causes me precisely the necessary amount of pain.