virus = "any disease-causing organism whatsoever"

[sagehen]

>"Just ignorant newscasters"?  I beg to differ.  You must mean "ignorant
>Americans." I started noticing this in the speech of Joe and Joanne
>Sixpack years ago. Joe and Joanne don't know from disease-causing
>organisms. They know about germs: synonym, "viruses." You can go for a
>long time in America without hearing the word "bacteria" (much less
>"bacterium"), except (perhaps) the friendly bacteria that clean your
>septic tank, or the helpful kind that live in your gut.  Somewhere in the
>collective unconscious of Joe and Joanne is an awareness that many
>bacteria cause disease, but if you're sick, it's almost gotta be  "some
>sort of virus" (And pass them antibiotics, Doc!).
>
>  "Virus" = "germ" is an unpleasant fact of linguistic life. Compare
>"stomach flu," which usually has nothing to do with influenza, or "the
>flu" loosely used to designate a bad cold with a low-grade fever or just a
>transient fever with minor flu-like symptoms ("I guess I'm coming down
>with the flu or something," "I was out two days with the flu, but I feel a
>lot better today," "I had the 24-hour flu").
>
>  My guess is that any brief illness symptomatically resembling influenza
>is routinely called "the flu" by the average college graduate.  Not to
>mention high-school graduate, dropout,
>  etc.  I also suspect that millions and millions of speakers think of
>"bird flu" as some vague kind of deadly bird disease not necessarily
>related to "influenza."
>
>  The commentator advising the avoidance of plague-packin' rodents was not
>a physician. IIRC, she was a "health correspondent."  Note well that she
>didn't say "Plague is caused by a virus."  She said things like, "Fleas
>can carry the virus" and "The virus killed nearly half of Europe in the
>Middle Ages."  Probably she knows the difference, but habit and
>inattention tend to prevail.
>
>  So I wouldn't chalk this (mis)use of "virus" up to something as
>self-contained as "ignorant newscasters."  I'd chalk it up to "semantic
>drift," which is not quite the same thing.
>
>  JL
 ~~~~~~~~
What ever happened to "bug"?  There was an all-purpose  term that  could
stand in for bacteria, viruses, prions, whatever micro-critters might be
involved *and*  for the diseases they caused.
AM

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