61–70 of 120 posts
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Facinating. There's a lot of Dutch people here. Some might want to translate
Old Dutch is actually a lot like Old English, they’re both sister languages. Supposedly speakers of those languages were able to (mostly) understand each other, similarly to a dialect.
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Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus". I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way. The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there…
Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\ This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly. Folks are over-thinking this.
https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.htm...
> But naming the virus Yambuku ran the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969.
> It was Karl Johnson, another researcher from the CDC, and the leader of the research team, who suggested naming the virus after a river, to tone down the emphasis on a particular place.
We were already going "place-based names kinda suck" in the 1970s.
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I'm sure if we start a Twitter storm about it, we can get him cancelled. /s Personally I think it was just observational, perhaps they were the only women in the place, so they were the exception. From what I know, historically nurses have been mostly female - but would be interested to find out if this was different.
Yup that was my understanding as well. Not sure why I'm being downvoted, it was a genuine question lol
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Amusingly, if you look at the talk section [1] of the Wikipedia article on the Spanish flu, some folks really (suddenly, recently, completely by coincidence) want to call it the 1918 flu. There's no con job like a retcon job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spanish_flu
Seems fair enough: > To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus". I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way. The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there…
Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\ This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly. Folks are over-thinking this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus". I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way. The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there…
Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\ This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly. Folks are over-thinking this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems fair enough: > To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish f…
Lyme disease, Ebola, et al would like to have a word.
Lyme disease was around in humans long before its identification in Old Lyme, CT, so it too is an inaccurate name.
(We've also learned a few things since the 1970s, let alone 1918. Now, we have a standard: https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl...)
So, going beyond the depressing, I think one good thing that will come out of all this since this situation isn't experienced in any of our lifetimes (including our elders) we have to reach back to history to find comparisons. Maybe this will spark a curiosity in history! There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube; I particularly like "The Armchair Historian".
Hundreds of hours in eu4 and wikipedia will do the trick too haha
Relevant combos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Debasement
,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_crosses_(Brugherio)#Bac...
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Lyme disease, Ebola, et al would like to have a word.
Ebola is actually named that to avoid naming it after a specific village, to reduce the stigma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704633 Lyme disease was around in humans long before its identification in Old Lyme, CT, so it too is an inaccurate name. (We've also learned a few things since the 1970s, let alone 1918. Now, we have a standard: https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl... )
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Facinating. There's a lot of Dutch people here. Some might want to translate
Old Dutch is actually a lot like Old English, they’re both sister languages. Supposedly speakers of those languages were able to (mostly) understand each other, similarly to a dialect.