Smacks of a poetry unit in high school English class doesn’t i?  Or a spelling bee? Reedy, anxious voices piping up, “May I have the origin of the word please?”

Euphemism, from ancient Greek.

Euphemism must have been in a unit long before 11th grade, but I vividly remember a delicious discussion of it in my Junior Shakespeare class, arising from the Bard’s clever uses of the word jade.

I’m no Bill, but I do love euphemism and I coin or appropriate new ones for my own life whenever I they strike me. As an avid cook, I now enjoy glossing over anything I have burned –literal bagels or figurative bridges– as caramelized.

Today I was introduced to “Conditions Not Consistent with the Package Insert.” This cries out to be acronymed to CNCPI and used liberally.

When  company makes a drug, they test it for a specific use to make sure it works and to make sure it is safe for that disease or problem. The drug might be able to do more than one thing, but unless the drug company tested the drug for other uses it cannot advertise, make claims, or encourage use beyond the specific condition it was developed for. But doctors can. And sometimes they do*. This practice has earned the sexy moniker ‘off-label use,’ which is a shorter way of saying CNCPI because the label and the package insert are, to most people, the same thing. But no drug company wants to be well known for the ‘off-label use’ of one of their products, so they have come up with a euphemism.

I think CNCPI could be used playfully for anything that did not go according to plan, or appear as advertised, or more naturally for glossing over a creative use for object. Did you tell your friend you would be happy to pet sit, only to find they expected you to live in their house for two weeks with  a flying squirrel two pet iguanas, a pot belly pig, three cats and two warm salt water tanks full of tropical fish? Dude! Conditions not consistent with the package insert!

Did you borrow your friend’s mascot uniform so you could attend a Furries’ convention?Conditions not consistent with the package insert!

Life’s a little rosier with a little CNCPI, use it well.

*misoprostol