The Mast-Head: The Root of Trouble

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”