Ask HN: I Need an English Word for the Italian “Untore” | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I Need an English Word for the Italian “Untore”

I'm looking for a close English equivalent to the Italian word "Untore." These were supposedly people who spread the plague deliberately by leaving substances on doorhandles and similar.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untore

An "Infector" is close, but doesn't really feel the same to me, so I thought I'd ask to see if anyone had a better suggestion.

Thank you - hope you don't find this too off-topic, but I'm a great believer in languages being more closely tied to thought than people usually realise, in computer languages as well as "natural" ones.

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Based on the literal meaning of the word and its Latin root, I'd say "anointer," but you'd have to explain the intended meaning. There's no equivalent idiom in American English that I know of.

Edited to add a note about the etymology: This word seems to have the Latin word "unguere" as its root, which means "to anoint" in the sense of applying oil (and also in the religious sense of anointment, which generally involves the application of oil). English speakers might recognize "unguent" and "unction" as descendants.

English got "to anoint" from Old French (I think) combining in + unguere, which gives the sense of a lesser application rather than, like, oiling something completely for lubrication.

I was tempted to recommend "unctor," which is a perfectly fine ecclesiastical Latin word that means "anointer" anyway and has a more obvious relationship to "untore," but as a native American English speaker, I don't find it very idiomatic.

[0]Wiktionary mentions "untore" as "plague spreader". But this might be a little on-the-nose maybe?

[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untore

Sounds like giftgivers and bugchasers, although that is specifically sexual.

What you're describing sounds like an inverted Munchausen Syndrome. I don't know if we have name for that in English.

I've heard of parasites controlling the behaviour of an animal host to spread themselves, it's not out of the question there are examples of human parasites that do the same e.g. encouraging irrational risk taking by elevating a hormone.

"Well poisoner"?

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