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“You’re OK, it’s just a bone bruise.”

It looks like someone is playing games with semantics in order to justify the notion that Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant could play with his current knee injury.

The team initially called it a hairline fracture. However, owner Jerry Jones has suggested that Bryant’s ability to play hinges on his ability and willingness to tolerate pain. NBC Sports Medicine Analyst Mike Ryan explained on Friday’s PFT Live that playing with a fracture is about more than playing with pain.

“You can put any kind of fancy adjective up front, call it a hairline fracture or a stress fracture, it’s still a crack in the bone,” Ryan said. “So the concern here is the fact of the injury itself getting worse. A fracture can always get worse. And if the rumors are true that it is in the tibia plateau, that’s a weight-bearing surface. . . . The biggest concern here is more of the injury itself worsening, not necessarily pain management.”

Coincidentally (or not), the F-word has now been removed from the diagnosis, unofficially.

“Source who has seen his results said a knee like his is commonly referred to as a bone bruise,” Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports. “No long-term risk.”

“A bone bruise is a pooling of blood in the bone secondary to high-impact trauma,” Ryan tells PFT regarding the revision to the assessment of the injury. “With any bone fracture there will be significant bleeding in the bone.”

The question remains whether there is or isn’t a fracture. The team has said there is, and the team has not yet rescinded that diagnosis. If there is a fracture, playing necessarily will entail risk of making the fracture worse.