Follow Up on Last Week's Post

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.

It comes from the Latin word for things as disparate as poison or plant sap or any slimy liquid. It probably comes from a Proto-Indo-European root weis, meaning to melt away or for a bad-smelling fluid, especially one that could be poisonous. In Sanskrit poison is visam, in Avestan vish-. Avestan is an eastern Iranian language, the language or Zoroastrianism. 

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.)

According to etymonline.com the adjective viral was first used in 1948. My dictionary puts the date as between 1935 and 1940, Merriam Webster says 1937. None cite the reference. 

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.

But alongside salt came the adjective saline, meaning “made of salt”, that has been around in English since about 1500, its form probably influenced by the Latin word for salt container – salinum.

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. 

When it opens in 2016 (at a estimated cost of over $1 billion) the plant in Carlsbad, California that is designed to take the salt out of salt water will not be a desalinization plant; it will be a desalination plant. Score one for reverse back-formation.

From now on I’m going with desalt. As in "pass desalt, please."