On September 14 2017, the day after a Florida nursing home lost air conditioning when a tree fell on their transformer in the wake of Hurricane Irma NPR’s Morning Edition referred to the home’s residents as “nursing home patients.” Are the words ‘home’ and ‘patient’ not oxymoronic, I wondered? Only hours later did it occur to me that ‘nursing’ and ‘home’ posed similar challenges, while ‘nursing’ and ‘patient’ went together perfectly. I began to wonder whether one could legitimately call a pla...