Vignettes

Medical education relies fairly heavily on the vignette - a short summary of the relevant information from which the budding doctor is supposed to be able to draw their conclusions.  Here's an example from the book I have open in front of me right now:

"A 40-year-old woman presents complaining of difficulty with swallowing.  Examination shows she has nasal speech, weakness of facial and neck muscles, receding hairline and a weak and slow hand grip."  

On reading this vignette, I conclude that I should probably study harder.

(Interestingly, the word "vignette" means "little vine", and comes from the curly vines used to border illustrations in books.  It eventually came to refer to the pictures themselves and the idea of the vignette as a small portrait was carried over into the literary meaning.)

Anyway, we had a doctor giving us a tutorial recently who was presenting a series of short cases like this, but she was referring to them as "vinaigrettes".  Naturally enough, me and my Esteemed Colleagues were trying not to smirk every time she did this, since we all get words wrong from time to time.  But maybe she was doing it on purpose.  It's the kind of thing I would do to amuse myself - deliberately mispronunciating words to make people wonder.  Even worse, perhaps she was deliberately insulting us, implying that rather than giving vignettes to students she was giving vinaigrette to vegetables. 

(I'm sorely tempted to go off on a rampage of vegetable puns but I'll restrain myself.  Maybe some will turnip in the comments section though.)