Hacker News Reader

Comment by NackerHughes | Hacker News Reader

> Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP.

And now, COVID.

View on HN

Ah yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease, totally in the same category as Gestapo

I think the point was that creating a term can create the idea of an entity one can taint with emotional meanings which may be used to enforce an agenda. «Telescoped words and phrases [and] abbreviations» for that aim do not need to be referencing political entities only. (The poster was probably just eliciting smiles or reflections when suggesting 'COVID')

Mussolini, it seems, choose 'OVRA' as a name for the secret police to suggest the "piovra" (octopus), the tentacled entity which reaches anywhere in agility and hypnotically remains fixed at its core while acting with unfolding determination at its periphery. These constructions can be more easily be emotionally charged. Instrumental emotional charge can be invested in terms from other areas, though instrumentality may remain political.

Technical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They even list tourism among the things that absolutely need protection against this type of language misuse[1].

[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...

> Spanish Flu

Which the Spanish called “French Flu”, and which many signs point to it actually being “American Flu”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

> American Flu

Funny how Wikipedia mentions that it was used early on in France but in order to avoid antagonizing an ally journalists were advised (source is a bit short on that) to call it the Spanish flu[1]. So there was also active suppression going on to keep the source out of the news, just back then it was at least partially war time censorship.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Geopolitical

>technical name

In an era where almost all viruses/diseases have been referred to by non-technical names, the rapid switch to a technical mouthful of “COVID-19” or “SARS CoV 2” is absolutely political.

I remember sitting at an airport last year watching newscasters denigrating the use of the term “Wuhan virus” as I had just walked past a sign warning about MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) just on the other side of security. It felt other-worldly. Then, after the CCP PR campaign of using the technical term had fully caught on, all of same news stations called the original variants the “UK/Kent variant” and the “Indian variant” for weeks/months until they caught themselves and switched to the Greek alphabet. And like programming with too much abstraction and bad variable names, the new Greek alphabet names for the variants actually obscure useful information — you no longer know where the hotbed locations are for each variant, and you have go looking online for their origins, instead of just having that info in the name.

West Nile, Guinea Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme disease, Ross River fever, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola, MERS, Marburg Virus, Spanish Flu, Lassa Fever, Legionnaires Disease. All without fanfare or protest. Wuhan virus? Oh, no no no. That would look bad for the party. Can’t have that.

Geez, how hard is it to just call it Covid rather than moan about it?

What next, do you want to complain about having to call the HIV-caused disease AIDS, do you prefer "gay cancer"? "Gay plague"?

As to where the hotbed for Delta variant is: nowadays, everywhere!

You forgot Irish disease, French disease, German disease, Italian disease [0]. Why do you think the toponym of the point of discovery of a virus or strain is relevant? At this point, it has been circulating on multiple continents for 18 months, your most likely source of infection is in your neighbourhood, not another country or person whose ancestry you believe to be associated with that place. Systematic names have been increasingly common for influenza strains for a decade now, and if anything the systematic name SARS-2 gives you more useful information about the virus. To the extent that the choice not to call it something arbitrary [1] like Spanish flu is political, it is to protect people from ostracism and hatecrimes, which is an actual problem that happens in such circumstances and has since December 2019 [0,2].

If we were making name choices for inherently-parseable utility, we’d be calling every respiratory virus Coverface Washhands Stayhome.

[0] https://jmss.vic.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Racis... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805838/#!po=1.... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12103-020-09545...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com