Tolkien or Antidepressant?

November 7, 2023 11:28 PM

Website game. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Related: Phonaesthetics

posted by zaixfeep (52 comments total)

(This should not be considered a MeFite purity test, if only because the test includes no cats or social justice topics. 😆 )
posted by zaixfeep at 11:33 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Porn Star or My Little Pony? (from the Brunching Shuttlecocks, a relic of the Second Age)
posted by JHarris at 11:39 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I swear to Eru that drugs manufacturers have the list of the rulers of Númenor and Gondor tacked to their walls and just move a couple of letters around to come up with names for antidepressants… or that’s my excuse for why I kept thinking the names of those folks were antidepressants.
posted by Kattullus at 11:42 PM on November 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

This is a surprisingly hard quiz. This has to be intentional.
posted by q*ben at 11:43 PM on November 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

Let not the diacritics fool you. Not all names that bear them walk Middle Earth.
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:10 AM on November 8, 2023 [25 favorites]

19/20, only missed because I mistook Nardil for Nardol.
posted by tavella at 12:34 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

*Ask your doctor if Celebrimbor is right for you.
posted by JHarris at 1:02 AM on November 8, 2023 [48 favorites]

23/24. I don't know what that says about me...
posted by Hairy Lobster at 1:04 AM on November 8, 2023

Previously.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 1:14 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Bombadil be damned. IRL I used to teach pharmacy technicians. One time after yadda yadda about meds for hypertension, I asked the class, rather petulantly, if they ever made a mistake when sent into the store room to retrieve a packet of an unpronounceable medicine because they're spelinge is not grate. There was a frisson of recognition through the room: seems that almost everyone had been scolded by The Pharmacist for getting the wrong drug at some stage. I mentioned this to my colleague, who is The Pharmacist in one of the shops in town, and she said everyone in the trade has done this and that the required extra attention to detail is what pays pharmacists the big bucks [not]. When some bright spark in marketing at MegaPharm decides that all the packaging needs to be redesigned, it is a huge pain behind the community pharmacy counter because everyone has to read the labels carefully rather than relying on the familiar gestalt. In the pharmacy trade homophony, exacerbated by crap hand-writing on prescriptions, rushed reading etc. has real potential for problems.
▶ Promazine v Promethazine; a dopamine blocker and sedative v an anti-histamine
▶Tamoxifen v Tenoxicam; the breast cancer therapy v a handy NSAID
▶ Vinblastine v Vincristine; well at least these two are both for cancer chemotherapy
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:17 AM on November 8, 2023 [17 favorites]

I'm imagining a TV ad for an antidepressant targeted directly at the elves of Lothlórien:

"Do you ever find yourself weary of this world, wistfully wishing for the sight of starlight on the Western Seas? Days you just don't feel like leaving the tree house? Well, now there's hope! Ask your doctor if Valinor is right for you."
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:46 AM on November 8, 2023 [49 favorites]

{Despite the 'new post' page not calling this out as a dupe before I hit 'post', polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice has noted the previous (the pre[c]ious?) and so I give my consent to the mods to take this one down. I'll leave flagging to polytope or others as they see fit.}
posted by zaixfeep at 3:08 AM on November 8, 2023

Although I can see how they might improve your mood, drugs for erectile dysfunction aren’t actually antidepressants.
posted by TedW at 3:38 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Please don't take this down. There are some great comments.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:40 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Put Latin in the oven until it melts and you get fantasy/pharmacy names. My endocrinologist laughed.

if they make a sex drug for ladies and don't call it niagra I will march in the streets with you
posted by adept256 at 3:51 AM on November 8, 2023 [20 favorites]

Only an Oxford professor of linguistics could write Lords of the Rings. It's of a time, of a place, and of a particular profession. It had to be him.

I heard that people complained that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had established the spelling of 'dwarfs', so his spelling, 'dwarves', was incorrect. His reply was that it was in the Oxford English Dictionary that way, a dictionary he happened to be editing.
posted by adept256 at 4:00 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

An ex of mine, who came out as trans about the same time I did, has the middle name Arwen. Yes. for that reason, He’s changing it to Faramir.

He took the quiz and was somewhat embarrassed to have only gotten 17 out of 20.
posted by mephron at 5:26 AM on November 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

I did barely better than random chance here. There were a couple of anti-depressants I knew and also Bilbo at the end, but mostly I was guessing and not doing it well.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:48 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Small story that drove me crazy at the time. I briefly freelanced doing design work for the (then) black-box drug Humira. This was way before there were ads for it all over TV, and it was considered high risk and only for pretty extreme cases of Crohn's, etc. Anyway, it's spelled HUMIRA but the company (Abbott and whoever invented the name) insisted that everyone pronounce it "hyu-MEHR-uh."

This was rigidly enforced around the office, and while new people sometimes mispronounced it, they were immediately gently (but firmly) corrected, and everyone was very very careful to say "hyu-MEHR-uh" and it made me irrationally angry that I had to play along, even with the clients not around.

Made a lot of money doing pharma advertising, but the whole experience was like that. This was my only time doing pharma, and at least this was a drug only offered to people in dire need, at least back then. People who really, really needed something — even with possible bad side effect — just to live a somewhat normal life without pain. Of course now it's considered "safe" and you can find it advertised everywhere. It's a form of biologic made from human antibodies and it's used for all sorts of auto-immune disorders. Insanely expensive of course!
posted by SoberHighland at 6:14 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Niagra

Nyadra. It has to be trademarkable.

(That's a big reason for these franco-latin-esque deformations. 'Arbitrary' or 'fanciful' names enjoy the strongest protection.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:34 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

@soberhighland How did Billy’s mom do?
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:56 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

18/24. Where do I go to turn in my depressed fantasy-reader nerd badge?
posted by tuesdayschild at 7:38 AM on November 8, 2023

That's a big reason for these franco-latin-esque deformations. 'Arbitrary' or 'fanciful' names enjoy the strongest protection.

For prescription drugs, it's not just trademark: Regulations prevent names that imply efficacy. So you can't name your new flu drug "Phlegmbuster" or "Flu-b-gone" or anything like that, even if those terms are trademarkable.

I'm kind of impressed how so many brand names kind of feel like they make sense despite being literally meaningless. Ambien, for an obvious example--I immediately think of boring music playing in the background while nothing happens.
posted by mark k at 7:41 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Eno you didn't
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:42 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ooof, 16/24. I kept thinking I’d finally figured out how to tell the difference (ok, clearly *this* one is a drug and *that* one has to be Tolkien) and then being wrong.
posted by leahwrenn at 7:46 AM on November 8, 2023

Let not the diacritics fool you. Not all names that bear them walk Middle Earth.

I did fall for that once. The actual drug name did not have a diacritical, they just put it in to make it harder to guess.

I got 16/24, which I think reflect that I knew about 8 and my guesses were 50/50.
posted by mark k at 7:48 AM on November 8, 2023

I like Tolkien, but haven't dug around past the Hobbit and LoTR books; so my 22/24 was merely an indictment of how many antidepressants I've had to try. Elronon got me good; how am I supposed to know the European brand name of a TCA?

Put Latin in the oven until it melts and you get fantasy/pharmacy names.

Melting (lol, superb) some pharma brand names for NPC's in my DnD game has just saved me a lot of time.
posted by furnace.heart at 7:56 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m not very good at this despite having been prescribed half of these when my psychiatrist was still throwing spaghetti at the wall back in the early 2000’s.
I’m mostly just glad I don’t have to name new drugs for a living.
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:17 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

23/24, argh! As both a massive Tolkien dork and someone who has worked in pharma supply chain for 2+ decades, that's really quite annoying - so close.

Narmacil, damnit...
posted by tomsk at 8:22 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Melting [latin](lol, superb)

It is funny, but it's also half of what jk rowling did.
posted by adept256 at 9:05 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Er, 23/24 not 19/20, not sure where that came from.
posted by tavella at 10:28 AM on November 8, 2023

half of what jk rowling did

Suffixus Attachio!
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Didn’t even use Elavil.
posted by atoxyl at 11:19 AM on November 8, 2023

19/24 which is weird, as a Tolkien nerd working in biomedical research I thought I'd do better

JHarris: "(from the Brunching Shuttlecocks, a relic of the Second Age)"

Pretty sure I first heard of MeFi through a link on Brunching Shuttlecocks
posted by caution live frogs at 11:20 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ooof, 16/24. I kept thinking I’d finally figured out how to tell the difference (ok, clearly *this* one is a drug and *that* one has to be Tolkien) and then being wrong.

The actual drug name did not have a diacritical

One here does. I had to go through this several times to get them all right, and more than once even to notice that I was getting that one wrong.
posted by atoxyl at 11:24 AM on November 8, 2023

In a D&D campaign I ran a halfling named Ginkgo Biloba. No one ever got the joke.
posted by SPrintF at 11:28 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

19/24. Also thought I'd do a bit better but I think this qualifies for second tier nerd badge or so.
posted by Glinn at 11:29 AM on November 8, 2023

23/24, fuck "Nardil".
posted by The Tensor at 11:31 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Pretty sure I first heard of MeFi through a link on Brunching Shuttlecocks

Huh; I’m pretty sure I first heard of the Brunching Shuttlecocks through MeFi. Reciprocity!
posted by TedW at 11:52 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

i don't know about you but i for one don't visit any site i didn't first hear about on spinnwebe
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:45 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Are there new sites out there now? I stopped checking after Dave's Cool Site of the Day stopped publishing.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I always though Alprazolam would make a terrific wizard name. More of an anti-anxiety drug than an antidepressant, I guess.
posted by Suedeltica at 3:02 PM on November 8, 2023

Pretty sure I first heard of MeFi through a link on Brunching Shuttlecocks

iirc Brunching Shuttlecocks also featured an infinitely looping random version of Closer to Fine that didn't make it into today's post on the blue
posted by taquito sunrise at 4:03 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Injecting a Good Omens antidepressant into this Tolkien conversation: Ask Your Doctor
posted by humbug at 5:04 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I loved this quiz. 21 for me, which made me a bit annoyed - thought I’d do better.
posted by gemmy at 5:08 PM on November 8, 2023

18/24. Feeling pretty upbeat now, especially not knowing anything about Mordor going in (except for the free Bilbo gimme).
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:11 PM on November 8, 2023

Right answers 15/24
posted by jobir at 6:15 AM on November 9, 2023

My final score was covered by the social media link icons, but I think I got around 18. I'm a moderate Tolkien nerd, having just read The Silmarillion over the past year. And I'm a physician so I knew some of the drugs.

-

haven't dug around past the Hobbit and LoTR books

The Silmarillion is most definitely not a novel. It's very interesting but is not for everyone. It reads like a history, somewhat like the Old Testament. It tells how the world was created then has accounts of 20 or so events that happened during the First and Second Ages (Hobbit & LOTR happen at the end of the Third Age). Those stories aren't dramatized but some of them are fantastic. Beren and Luthien would make a great movie. In summary, if you read one book about the silmarils, it should be The Silmarillion.
posted by neuron at 3:32 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Beren and Luthien would make a great movie.

yes and also it's tragic that there's no extremely high-budget production featuring fingolfin's attempt to solo morgoth because that would be pretty fun to watch i think
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:36 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

My final score was covered by the social media link icons

That happened to me to but when I scrolled the score moved and the icons didn't. Or vice versa.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:56 PM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's tragic that there's no extremely high-budget production featuring fingolfin's attempt to solo morgoth

We have an extremely low-budget one instead: Sil
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 6:10 AM on November 10, 2023

I want to see Stephen Colbert take this quiz live on his show. The man is a Tolkien encyclopedia.
posted by dnash at 8:22 AM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]