Janet Byron Anderson

Janet Byron Anderson has a B.A. in English (Long Island University, Brooklyn NY), M.A. in Linguistics (University of Chicago), and PhD in Linguistics (University of Pennsylvania). She is well versed in all periods and aspects of the English language.

She works as a medical editor, and she's served as a consultant on medical English usage; for instance, as linguistic and lexicographic consultant for the 4th edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology, ed. John Last, published by Oxford University Press, 2001.

She also writes articles on medical usage as well as general usage. Among them, "The Language of Eponyms," published in the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians, London (1996), "The World of Medical Style and Usage," in the AMWA Journal, the journal of the American Medical Writers Association, 2001. "Learning to Edit Foreign Englishes," in The Editorial Eye (2005), "A Fresh Look at Managing Jargon," in The Editorial Eye (2007), and others. She is multicultural and multilingual and uses her knowledge of other languages to clarify current issues. For instance, many of today's English medical terms, especially medical eponyms, originated in German. It's instructive and fascinating to observe the fate of these terms as they migrated from their original home.

She writes a series of articles on medical English under the title Medical Linguistics Updates, which she's now revising. The revisions along with added Updates will soon be posted on her Web site www.medlinguistics.com

Byron Anderson brings a strong historical sense to her work on medical and general usage. She believes that problems of grammar and usage should be viewed within the context of existing patterns in the language, and that understanding the history and drift of English provides depth and objectivity to prescriptivist guidelines (including those that apply to medical English), freeing these guidelines from subservience to unexamined convention and personal opinions.

Emphasis upon contemporary and historical contexts forms the foundation of her philosophy of usage. This emphasis uncovers hidden connections and related problems. One example: The trend toward simplifying an eponym like "Down's syndrome" to "Down syndrome" is related to the fluctuation we see between teenaged vs. teenage offspring, and between possessive "children's hospital" vs. nonpossessive "childrens hospital."