"vaccine"

[Dave Wilton]

It was a glitch in word retrieval. I meant "confer," but the morning
caffeine hadn't kicked in yet.

I wasn't sure of the usage and did a quick lookup in the OED, which was open
in my browser at the time, and came across the first sense of "infer"
meaning "to bring on, bring about, induce, occasion, cause..." And the
second sense of "to confer, bestow." I failed to note that these senses were
marked as obsolete.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2007 8:34 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "vaccine"

On Apr 1, 2007, at 7:28 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:

> The original vaccine, the one for smallpox, has long been used to
> infer
> immunity on those already exposed to the disease in addition to the
> use as a
> preventive measure.

... infer immunity on...

is this an anticipation of the prefix in "immunity"?  or a glitch in
word retrieval?  or an intended (but innovative) use of
"infer" (where "confer immunity (on)" is the usual idiom)?

i got only one google webhit for "infer immunity on":

Vaccines are created by manufacturers and are given, usually by
injection, to infer immunity on the receiving individual to a
specific infectious disease. ...
www.articleworld.org/index.php/Category:Vaccines

a handful of relevant hits for "infer immunity to [a disease]" and
maybe a couple of dozen for "infer immunity" without an object.

ca. 137,000 for "confer immunity", 771 for "confer immunity on".

arnold

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