Sometimes the naming of a drug is a mystery, and I always wondered what the name of
RU-486, or the "abortion pill", meant, but I think I get it now. Just read it out loud as a question, and it gives itself away: "Are you for eighty-six?" Eighty-six means to cut or discontinue something, or to get rid of something or somebody, right? So basically, RU-486 stands for: "Are you for eighty-sixing this fetus (from your body)?" And as such, it makes perfect sense for the functionality of this pill. (This is probably one of the only cases where the letter-number combination of a pill actually makes sense and describes what the pill is for. But I wonder if the company named it as such intentionally, or if it was just an accident that it ends up representing the pill's intended purpose in a cryptic letter-number pairing?)
Here is a link to a webpage describing possible explanations for the origin of the term "86":
http://ask.yahoo.com/20030822.html
You know, if this naming of RU-486 was intentional as a sort of acronym, and it actually means to represent what I'm suggesting here, that's surprisingly blunt and crass, isn't it?
(After writing this, I got curious, and supposedly, according to Wikipedia, the drug was given this name based upon the initials of the drug company, and a shortening of the number of the chemical compound developed by that company. But what an odd coincidence, isn't it? Here's the link to that, and the explanation is in the first paragraph of the section "History"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifepristone
