Itis Is A Pain

My yoga teacher never tires of translating Sanskrit terms into English, sometimes in fanciful ways.  She claims she does this merely to keep them straight in her own mind, but I believe she is trying to brainwash us or worse, turn us into purveyors of cornball humor.  For example, "-asana" in Sanskrit is loosely translated as "pose."  

For example, savasana is "corpse pose."  "Sav-" must be the root word for corpse and "-asana" is pose.  Virasana is the hero pose (Vir- looks like it comes from virile).  Sometimes it gets out of hand, and we are into analyzing roots for four or five syllable words with multiple prefixes, all the while we (her class) are straining to hold a pose.  

I had a French professor in college who was like that.  Professor Gookin knew multiple languages and was really a Linguistics professor.  He would get started on explaining the derivation of a word and go on for most of the class.  Some of us tried to encourage this as we got closer to the end of a quarter, since he would only test us on the chapters we completed.  A class spent wandering far afield explaining the history of a word meant a chapter we would not cover in time for the mid-term.  

Back to the yogi, she has spent months teaching me "old-guy-asana;" moves and poses are similar to real yoga, but with an old guy's limited ability to reach and stretch.  Usually this is characterized by improvement, as each time, the old guy bends and stretches a little farther than he did the day before.  One of her recent forays into the world of words was explaining that "Itis is a pain."  Among medical professionals, when you see the suffix "-itis," it usually means inflammation.  But pain is commonly associated with inflammation, so she was, as usual, mostly right.  I can think of dozens of "-itises" like appendicitis, arthritis, bronchitis, gingivitis, tendonitis-- and they all sound painful.  

She has more than once offered the opinion that yoga can cure arthritis.  She qualifies that statement by pointing out that it cures it in the sense that it can reduce or eliminate the pain.  Once again, lots of medical professionals would agree, exercise can help reduce the pain of arthritis.  It also provides a better range of movement and joint mobility, increased muscle strength, less stiffness and increased energy.  

So, we gather several times a week to shed our "-itises" while learning Sanskrit and holding poses, strenuous as that sometimes seems.  There must be a word in Sanskrit for this, but in English I am sure there's another '-itis" in it somewhere.