TRIAGE

The word triage does not have three etymologies.

Etymologies can be triaged into three distinct categories:

1) True etymologies

2) Deceiving etymologies

3) False etymologies

They can also be triaged into a fourth category:

4) Etymologies that have nothing to do with the concept of three

And we shall triage the word triage into that fourth category. Some of you are wondering how a word so clearly based on the Latin/Greek prefix tri- can be used in the context of organizing into any number of categories. And the answer is that historically triage has nothing to do with the concept of three, thus its inclusion in category 4 (and its applicability to category 2). The tri- is related to try, a verb that has various meanings of selection, testing, culling.

Triage, the French noun indicating the action of the verb trier (“to cull”), came to us by the early 1700s. Trier is the source of our verb to try, from a much earlier borrowing, from Old French. Try a new restaurant—investigate it. Try a defendant—in essence, cull out the truth. Try your patience—test it. (And lord knows I’ve tried. . . .)

Triage denoting three has been bolstered by war-time medical triage (from World War I), in which the wounded were prioritized—coincidentally into three groups—according to those who needed immediate attention, those who could survive a wait while more serious injuries were attended to, and those who were unlikely to survive at all. Yet, these three distinctions are not upheld in the medical world these days. Here’s a note I spotted on the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: “Patients will be triaged into one of five categories on the National Triage Scale according to the triageur’s response to the question: This patient should wait for medical care no longer than . . . ?’” Perhaps they should call this quintrage instead of triage, and if so, we’d have to triage the history of quintrage into a fifth category:

5) Smart-aleck etymologies