Someone who is employed is called an employee. Someone who is drafted is called a draftee. Someone who is invited is called an invitee. So what do we call someone who is vaccinated?
A vaccinee. I didn't know that word until I came across it the other day in an ad for a brand of vaccine. I was almost ready to scorn it as a word of recent, unneeded coinage. Then I looked it up and found that it dates to the late 1800s.
The word vaccine, from which vaccinee sprang, will appear frequently as the flu season progresses. As with most words we use, most of us will not give a thought to where it came from.
It came from cows, not in the milk-and-butter sense but in the etymological sense. The noun vaccine once meant a cowpox serum used in vaccinating against smallpox. It developed from an earlier adjective, spelled the same way and defined as relating to cowpox.
Vacca is a Latin word for cow. The adjective vaccine was borrowed from the Latin vaccines, meaning of or from cows.
In Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse, one of his poems begins:
"The friendly cow all red and white
"I love with all my heart.
"She gives me cream with all her might
"To eat with apple tart."
With the etymology of vaccine in mind, especially during flu season, we vaccinees can add a layer to Stevenson's praise of the lowly cow.
Sometimes it pays to have a dictionary close at hand when watching science or nature shows on television. So it was the other night when I was watching an excellent show on the Animal Planet channel about wildlife in Siberia.
The narrator mentioned that some creatures there are crepuscular, a word whose meaning I once knew but had forgotten. It means that the creatures prefer to forage in morning or evening twilight. It derives in a roundabout way from the Latin crepus, meaning obscure.
The subject of issue vs. problem is one that some readers seem never to tire of hearing and commenting on. The latest is Jeff Ward of New York. His views on the subject parallel mine, so I am giving it another outing. Who knows but that we may gain some converts through persistence? Ward wrote:
"I came across your column from last spring about the word issue eating the word problem. This has bugged me since I first encountered it years ago, at an advertising firm. I had drawn up a list of strategies available to a client, with a column listing problems with each. An account executive manager liked the list but wanted ‘Problems' switched to ‘Issues.'
"As weeks passed I noticed that the swap was standard practice at the firm. More disturbingly, it started to become standard in the real world too -- I remember hearing a stationery store manager carping on the phone that ‘it seems like every time I ask him to do something, he has an issue with it. Well, if he's gonna have an issue with me, I got an issue with him.'
"My problem with the switch is that ‘issue' here is, of course, a euphemism, and an especially craven one to boot. It reflects the human-resources tendency to round corners, soften edges and remove fiber from things, injecting them instead with warm vanilla cream.
"It's timid, I think, and even paranoiac to shy away from a good English word in favor of one that's nearly inert in that context. And as you say, the difference between the words is useful. There's even a bit of danger in downplaying dangers. Surely you want to identify problems so you can address them forthrightly rather than denaturing them with gauzy language."
To which my response is: indeed.
Richard Creed is a retired Journal editor. He can be reached at richcreed@triad.rr.com
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