Pandemic
It took a global lockdown to afford me the time to write this blog, so I figure it makes sense to digest some of the interesting etymologies of words arising more commonly in a time of a pandemic and enforced quarantines.
Pandemic is a word from Greek composed of pan, which means ‘all’, and demos, meaning ‘people’. Pan occurs in various English words of Greek descent, like pancreas (‘all-flesh’), panorama (‘all-sight’) and the amazing pandemonium (‘the place of all the daemons’)*. Compare pandemic with epidemic (epi = among, demos = people) and endemic (en = in, demos = people) — these are all Greek words.
The virus that compelled this blog into life is (of course) the COVID-19 Coronavirus. Corona means crown — indeed, the two words come from the same root. Coronaviruses were named as such because the virus is bordered with a crown-like structure, and lots of other things have coronas too — stars, flowers and, forgive the honesty, penises. Slight variants of the word appear in the official currencies of various European nations, such as the Czech koruna or the Norwegian krone. And there’s even a species of snail called corona. So coronas are everywhere in language, and although the most famous example of the word in English is probably Corona beer, we see it in coronations (crownings), coronary arteries (which surround the heart like a crown) and coroner’s reports (an official who investigates suspicious causes of death on behalf of the Crown).
COVID-19 Coronavirus is highly contagious, which, etymologically at least, means it is something you pass on with touch. The word comes into English via Old French but ultimately from the Latin word contagio (con = with, tagere = touch). Derivatives include contact and tactile (‘perceptible to touch’). It’s not unlikely that the children’s game tag (where the aim is to touch your opponents) comes from the same root too.
Those who are unfortunate enough to contract coronavirus are put into quarantine, which is one of the small proportion of words in English that come from Italian. In fourteenth century Italy, trading ships suspected of carrying foreign diseases were locked down and all crewmen were prevented from leaving the ships for a period of time — forty days, to be exact. Italian for ‘forty days’ is quaranta giorni, which ultimately became the word we find in English today as quarantine. Thanks to our modern understanding of science those with Coronavirus are only required to spend a nominal fourteen days in quarantine, which, etymologically speaking, doesn’t make any sense at all.
* As Mark Forsyth points out in The Etymologicon, pandemonium is one of the many words for which we have John Milton to thank - in this case from the 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost.
