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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't contract usually used?

One does not "acquire cancer" or "acquire STDs". Why would one "aquire Malaria"?

You usually aquire cars and houses and companies and a taste for coffee and good things - not Malaria.

I don't know what is usually used, but I do know that it is correct to say that you acquire diseases that you aren't born with, like malaria. So, yes, one does certainly acquire STDs. It depends with cancer. Some cancers are inherited, some are acquired.

Yes, you can also acquire a car, but I'm not sure why that might lead one to think that "acquired malaria" is incorrect...

"Acquiring" usually implies "by one's own efforts" rather than being infected with a disease.

I'm not sure how "to gain" excludes gaining a disease. In any case, as I've alluded to before, other uses of acquire don't make the definition of developing a disease you weren't born with any less legitimate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> One does not … “acquire STDs”

AIDS stands for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome”.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

And now we've arrived at the debate behind the Third Edition of Webster's Dictionary. Are dictionaries to be a record of historic usage, or current usage? The Third Edition leaned completely in the direction of the the latter, and caused a lot of controversy in the dictionary world. I tend to lean towards the former view on how dictionaries should function, or else we'll lose all ability to understand historic texts as definitions drift over time.

The poignant example being "acquire", which historically implied "getting by one's own efforts" but has drifted to be used more passively now.

Personally, I encounter "acquire" more often than "contract," and I spend a good chunk of my work week on infectious disease lately.

When a company contracts another company, the latter will eventually go away after it's dealt with, but when a company is acquired, it will stay forever.

So I guess diseases are similar? :-)

Aquiring is a more generic term than you think. Its the Latin word for "getting something".

Maybe to emphasize the point that it was acquired from mosquitos in the US.

Yes. The word "contract" would be ambiguous between the people being infected with malaria in the US or them developing symptoms in the US after having been first infected while abroad. Using "acquire" doesn't present that ambiguity.

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