Cold and allergy medicine advertising has lost the proper usage of one of its own key phrases, and it drives me damn near mad.
The phrase, people, is TIMED RELEASE. Not TIME RELEASED. The latter pair of words has no meaning. The former means that a drug is formulated with inactive ingredients which control its release into the body, so that its effectiveness is measured across a longer period of time. It is, in short, TIMED. Time released would just be time let out of prison. Since we can't constrain it in the first place - we can't actually release time itself. It might make a catchy title for a story or novel, linguistically - pharmaceutically - it really has no meaning.
Just saying.
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2 comments:
Timed release is also meaningless, unless there is some mechanism that releases the active ingredient instantly, with no passage of time.
I suppose that's true too, but there are ways to slow the action of a drug, so they call it "timed" since there is a chemical control in place. A drug may not act instantaneously, but its formulation is not usually directed toward the duration of its release into the blood stream - so one with that addressed by its compounding is considered timed by comparison to the standard.
The thing is, *grammatically* at least, a release which is timed makes some kind of sense. If it's imprecise, at least it communicates some sort of conceivable concept. But time-released has no meaning, it explains no practical function.
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