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Comment by ldx1024 | Hacker News Reader

It may just be a pet peeve, but it rankles me a bit when the term "epidemic" is used to describe widespread conditions that are not communicable/infectuous. Looking at the dictionary it appears the usage here is legitimate, but my guess would be that it is a misuse that has become accepted, like using the term "begging the question" to mean suggesting the question.

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Epidemiologists study health at the population level in general, not just communicable diseases. So at least in that sense the "epidemi-" prefix isn't limited to infection. Is there any better term for a health issue with rapidly increasing prevalence?

A dictionary of medicine from 1882 suggests that common usage of the word has become more narrow, not less, and that there was some level of debate about the technical meaning [1]. Stedman's Medical Dictionary (1920) gives a more modern definition, "a disease attacking nearly simultaneously a large number of people", without restriction to infectious diseases.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Dictionary_of_Medic...

>but it rankles me a bit when the term "epidemic" is used to describe widespread conditions that are not communicable/infectuous

but short sightedness caused by lack of sunlight exposure is infectuous.

why do you think kids are being kept at home? because of their parents. and why do the parents keep them at home? because of a cultural and societal shift in behavior. and why is this shift happening? because some ideas floating around have infected a large enough number of people.

human ideas (or memes if you like) are precisely like viruses, and if short-sightedness is caused by some ideas being spread then it's no different than it being an actual virally caused disease.

All novel linguistic constructs are 'misuses' in some sense or another that have become accepted.

In this case that's not so though, the etymology is from the Greek '(upon|near|against) the people, and does not necessarily refer only to disease.

Etymology in interesting, but has almost zero relevance in determining how acceptable a use of a word is.

That's precisely the point of the first line of my comment.

Oh sorry, I misinterpreted.

You should probably leave it to the Academies, given that others take the opposite general stance.

What the server /accepts/ is left to configuration (some still recommend, "Strict in formulating the output, loose in interpreting the input"). What is "legitimate" is another matter, and will have to consider the term's curriculum, also because other proposals are faulty (e.g. conventionalism: "/whose/ convention?").

The term does appear to have a long history. This source states that using it as a term for widespread non-infectuous conditions is relatively recent:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3373038/#!po=96...

I agree, the usage of the word “epidemic” has become an epidemic.

I don't know about shortsightedness but for instance obesity is a legitimate epidemic. Whipe it is behavioural it is well known that social groups influence each other on this, so like a virus it spreads between people. The same may be true for shortsightedness too to some degree.

Given that it was used this way consistently for over hundred years including back in Homer text, one could argue it is not misuse at all.

Medicine started to use already existing word, which is fine, but it does not mean original meaning must be erased.

The medical use is not strictly tied to infection, as the OP would have expected. In Hippocrates, "epidemic" vs "endemic" is akin to "temporary" vs "permanent".

Please do also see the sibling post from member 'one-more-minute'.

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