Cancer and linguistics

I recently watched an Instagram video from a breast cancer awareness event in my home country, Kuwait, whose population is Arabic-speaking and relatively conservative. A couple of things were linguistically noteworthy.

First, it’s encouraging that these events are even taking place. I remember when I was growing up, cancer was referred to among common folk as “the bad disease” or “the malignant disease,” both of which had the air of “the disease which shall not be named” or “the disease which we do not speak of.” Evidently, this mincing of words is no longer needed, and the Arabic medical term for cancer (which has the same crab etymology as the English term) is now commonly used without reservation. I don’t have any hard evidence to support this claim, but it could very well be that an increase in cancer awareness is a consequence (or a cause) of this subtle shift in language. One piece of supporting evidence is that I just looked up the country’s foremost oncology center by its old name (originally named after its benefactor: Husain Makki Juma Center for Specialized Surgery—note the ambiguity), and to my surprise, it’s been renamed to the more matter-of-fact Kuwait Cancer Control Center. So maybe it’s not just my imagination, since the change has been both colloquial and formal (or systemic).

The second thing is that people have adopted the terminology of “battling cancer,” which I’m sure is a direct import from the anglophone world. That linguistic framing of cancer as a foe to wage battle against and defeat or be defeated by is strange even in English, but it’s stranger to hear it translated to Arabic. Kuwait is a relatively conservative Muslim country, where life, death, health, and disease are still (at least nominally) seen as preordained. This doesn’t preclude the use of modern medicine (lots of nuance here that I don’t have time for), but it does affect people’s attitudes towards disease, which attitudes often have the air of acceptance, at least in appearance, since the outcomes of disease are believed to be matters of divine fate. So it’s an interesting shift to see people speaking openly about their battles with fate, so to speak.