time it's regarding muscles and how muscle names can be a shortcut to learning the muscles,

where they're at, and what they do. You probably have been given a list by your instructor

as to what muscles you need to be able to identify or maybe it's a list that's In your

lab manual. In any case, once you look at all those muscle names, it looks like a lot

of gibberish, doesn't it? It look like it's written a foreign language. Well, you know

what? It is. Even English versions of these muscle names are derived from Latin. And that's

something that's very useful to know. You might think it's a hindrance, but actually

it's a help. Let's take a look at this group of muscles that are adductor muscles, that

is, they have the word adductor in their name. And, as you can imagine, these are muscles

that do adduction. That is, they adduct, in this case the femur, by bending the hip joint

and bringing the the leg toward the midline, or the median plane, of the body. Now the

first one we have shown there is in green and is called adductor magnus. Adductor means

it's an adductor muscle, of course, and magnus is the Latin word for great or large and you

can see it's a very large muscle. We can't really see the whole thing in this view because

there are a couple other muscles in the way. As a matter of fact, those muscles are adductor

muscles as well. For example, the one highlighted in yellow now is is adductor brevis and brevis

is a Latin word that means brief or short. And, as you can see, it is very short compared

to adductor magnus, isn't it?. When we look at the third one with adductor in its name,

and it's adductor longus and, well, as you can imagine, longus means long. And so it's

longer than brevis and of course magnus is really huge compared to all of them. So we

have three different abductor muscles all very close to one another. And so how do you

tell them apart? Well, their names! One is very big, one is short, and one is long. Now

one weird thing about Latin, you probably already noticed, is the words seem to the

words seem to be backwards in the phrase. Let's take a closer look at that. In English,

when we have a phrase like red wagon, in Latin it would be rendered as wagon red instead,

of course using Latin words, not English words. But this is to show the word order. So there

is a different word order these two languages. And so the modifier, which is the adjective,

in this case red, is modifying a noun. Which in this case is wagon. And so the modifier

comes after the term that it modifies in Latin, which is backwards from English. Let's look

at another example. Big red wagon. In Latin, that would be rendered as wagon red big. And

so the modifiers come after the terms being modified. So let's apply that to one of these

Latin names like, ooh, here's a long one: extensor carpi radialis brevis. That sounds

like a mouthful but it's really kind of a whole phrase or sentence in Latin. An extensor,

of course, is going to extend a part, that is, stretch it out. And carpi means of the

wrist. Remember carpal bones, or the wrist bones. Radialis in this case means pertaining

to, or near, or at the radius bone of the forearm. And then brevis, we already know,

means short. So if we put that all together and translate it into a good English word

order, it means the short wrist stretcher at the radius. Which tells you an awful lot

about that muscle: where to find it and what is does. Now there are some other names of

muscles that are not whole phrases but describe some aspect of the muscle. Like the gracilis

muscle shown here. We see it's a muscle that is a long slender muscle. And that's what

the term gracilis means is slender. So the gracilis muscle is the slender muscle. Another

mnemonic device that you might be able to use is graceful: it's a long slender graceful

muscle. Here's another one with kind of an odd name but, when translated into Latin,

make a lot of sense. The buccinator or BUK-sin-ay-ter muscle is a muscle of the cheek and it's called

the trumpeter muscle. And that's because when you are blowing a trumpet, you really need

to use this muscle to compress the air in your mouth and thus push it to and through

the trumpet. Now where are you gonna learn all this stuff? Maybe you haven't taken a

Latin class, probably haven't taken a Latin class, or two or three. And so, you know,

how are you gonna figure this out? Well, I suggest the Survival Guide for Anatomy and

Physiology. And if you use this little link here, you can type that into your browser

and get to a description of that book. And not only do I explain how to do this but I

give you some tables on how to do the translation. And a free resource that you can download

yourself is a this list of muscle names that you can download from my site at lionden.com

and so here's the URL for that. So type that your browser and you can download a couple

different versions of my muscle name list that has the translation of the name of at

least some of the major muscles, not ever muscle in the body. That, and other, study

tips are always available for you at my blog, which is found at theAPstudent.org