Word: paines
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...happens to every medical student sooner or later. You get a cough that persists for a while or feel a funny pain in the stomach or notice a tiny lump under the skin. Ordinarily, you would just ignore it--but now, armed with your rapidly growing store of medical knowledge, you can't help worrying. The cough could mean just a cold, but it could also be a sign of lung cancer. A twinge might be internal bleeding. The lump is probably a lymph node--but is it bigger than it should be? Could it be Hodgkin's disease...
...tens of thousands who suffer from true hypochondria, it's no joke. Hypochondriacs live in constant terror that they are dying of some awful disease, or even several awful diseases at once. Doctors can assure them that there's nothing wrong, but since the cough or the pain is real, the assurances fall on deaf ears. And because no physician or test can offer a 100% guarantee that one doesn't have cancer or multiple sclerosis or an ulcer, a hypochondriac always has fuel to feed his or her worst fears...
...problem more like depression, often triggered by something that makes them feel guilty--an affair, perhaps--or by a loss, like the death of a close relative. And the third group consists of people who somatize--which means they focus an inordinate amount of attention on their bodies. A pain that most people wouldn't even notice feels like a punch in the nose to those in this group...
...notions of victory and failure. The Rugby World Cup is best experienced less as a series of contests than as a celebration of man's athletic potential. But it's more than that. Soccer's a great game, but you won't see rugby players at this Cup faking pain to gain advantage - real pain follows the rugby player everywhere - and you're certain to see acts of sportsmanship and good grace in defeat rarely seen at other high-stakes tournaments. Minnows like Namibia, Uruguay and Georgia may suffer hidings, but fair-minded Australian crowds will warmly applaud their efforts...
...necessarily South African. In 1980, when Coetzee's masterpiece Waiting for the Barbarians was published, I was in the U.S., living among people who took it as a surreal cowboy story set on some nameless frontier. For me, and for many white South Africans, it was an unbearably painful allegory about our daily lives and moral dilemmas, engaging us on a psychic level so deep and compelling that reading it left one dazed and hypnotized. In my judgement, Barbarians alone was enough to earn Coetzee literature's ultimate accolade, but there were many more great novels in his pen, foremost...