Last week I mentioned the word virus, thinking it would be a good
start for a follow up post. And so it is. But in researching virus I realized
for the first time that there are two adjectives related to virus that seem
like they would have the same meaning: viral and virulent. Let’s begin with
virus, the first word to arrive in English.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Follow Up on Last Week's Post
Very quickly after the introduction of virus into English came the
adjective form, virulent. Originally describing fluids, within 200 years it developed the addition meaning of
violent or spiteful (or both). But its meaning was still relating to poisonous or at least very noxious. It had nothing to do with viruses. And so matters remained for over 500 years.
In the late 1900s a Russian scientist named Dmitri Ivanovsky studied what became known as the tobacco mosaic virus, and then began the study of viruses. Viruses came to be defined as a biological agent that causes cell reproduction in its hosts. (But that doesn't make them violent or spiteful.)
The internet-related meaning (e.g., “Larry’s blog has gone viral”)
is from 1999, “originally in reference to marketing and based on the similarity
of the effect to the spread of a computer virus,” according to etymonline.com.
Another word I used at
the very end of the blog was desalinization. Let’s start this analysis with the
base word: salt. Salt is an Old English word with cognates in many other
languages, including Latin, where the word is sal. Add the
prefix de- indicating “remove” and you have the verb desalt. Desalt was the
word of choice for a long time.
By 1650 the noun
salinity was formed to indicate gradation of saltiness. Then in 1705 the
back-formation of the adjective saline into salination took place. (Probably
the result of efforts by The Salination Army.)
But it wasn’t until 1943
that someone decided to try and take the salt out of something, and rather than
use the old unfamiliar word desalt they decided upon desalination. Then in the
early 1960s someone decided to create a verb from desalination and came up with
desalinize (or desalinise in Britain). Eventually someone took desalinize and
back-formed yet another noun from it: desalinization. Desalinization can be
found in Random House dictionary and the American Heritage Science Dictionary.
Labels:
desalination,
desalinization,
desalinize,
desalt,
salination,
saline,
salinity,
salt,
viral,
virulent,
virus
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