infected by radiation poisoning

[Joel S. Berson]

Seems like an old and honored sense.  From the OED:

To imbue a person or thing with certain (esp.
bad) qualities; said either of the personal or material agent.

  1. trans. To affect, influence, or imbue with
some quality or property by immersion or infusion.
b. To impregnate or imbue with some qualifying
substance, or active principle, as poison, or
salt; to taint. Obs. or rare.  (1550 through 1853)

†2. To affect injuriously or unpleasantly; to
spoil or corrupt by noxious influence, admixture,
or alloy; to adulterate. Obs.  (1440 through 1693)

3. To impregnate or taint with deleterious
qualities; to fill (the air, etc.) with noxious
corruption or the germs of disease; to render
injurious to health.  [I.e., not only with germs.]  (1480 through 1885

4. a. To affect (a person, animal, or part of the
body) with disease; to communicate a morbific
virus or noxious germs so as to generate disease;
to act upon by infection or contagion. Also absol.  (c1386 through 1845)

[And then various senses less literally related to noxiousness or disease.]

Joel

At 8/4/2011 02:12 AM, victor steinbok wrote:
>A promo for an upcoming cable drama episode used the phrase "infected
>by radiation poisoning" which apparently is uttered in one of the
>scenes. A quick check suggests that being "infected" by radiation or
>one of its aspects is in fairly common use in texts promoting
>radiation survival, although it appears in other venues as well (at
>least one Trekkie site). Has this ship sailed? Does "infected" mean
>having been exposed to any kind of (physically) harmful influence that
>causes an illness?
>
>VS-)
>
>Three examples:
>
> > Shower with soap and water, scrubbing hard to
> remove any possible radiation from the body.
> This helps with the remaining 10% of external
> contamination, and lowers the risk of you
> breathing, ingesting or being _infected_ by harmful radiation particles.
>
>
> > Now that you've evacuated yourself from the
> _infected_ area and cleaned up a bit, it's time
> for the third step—increasing your distance to
> the infected zone. If you double the distance
> between you and the danger zone, the possible
> exposure of radiation is reduced by a factor of 4 (inverse-square law).
>
>
> > I then pointed out to you the comparative
> numbers of people who died or were _infected_
> by radiation sickness in the MONTH after
> Chernobyl and in the MONTH (that is all we have
> so far) after Fukushima, and you extrapolated
> from that the fact that I was under-estimating
> the number of people who died or became
> infected after Chernobyl (a complete non
> sequitur if ever there was one, albeit a self-serving one).
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org