Trying to Change Bad Grammar

I have a thing about the proper use of the verb, “diagnose.” When I read a sports columnist report that a quarterback had been diagnosed with a torn ligament in his knee or hear a news anchor say that an actress had been diagnosed with breast cancer, my reaction is the feeling I get on hearing nails scrape a blackboard. There may be other instances of ignoring proper grammar, but something down deep in me stirs to a boil when “diagnose” is misused. I guess it all started when I started editing in earnest for a national medical journal. I had published a few articles before that but had never paid much attention to using words for clarity and preciseness. At a lunch at a medical meeting I happened to mention that I did a bit of editing of grand rounds for the hospital. A cardiologist sitting next to me asked if I would like to have them published in the bimonthly journal of which he was the editor for internal medicine. So it began---the attempt to convert the spoken word into the written word, always trying to use words whose meaning was exactly what the speaker intended. When I encounter the misuse of “diagnose,” I react by sending an email as follows: “You can diagnose a flat tire. You can diagnose flat feet. You can diagnose bad teeth. But you cannot diagnose a person. You can say that “a doctor diagnosed a ruptured cartilage in the quarterback’s knee” or that “her physician made a diagnosis of breast cancer.” Long ago I stopped sending corrections to abusers of grammar because I soon found I was not changing anybody’s bad habits---the misuse of “diagnose” continued without a pause. I heard from only one person I wrote to: Elizabeth Farnsworth of The News Hour. I had written her about her report that someone “had been diagnosed with breast cancer.” She thanked me for my letter of August 11th, 1999 (hers was dated November 29, 1999) apologized for responding so tardily, and said she would try to incorporate the proper use of “diagnose” in her delivery.