When I taught English, I warned my students about "verbal viruses"—phrases that spread through the mass media, infecting people's vocabularies and inducing often-permanent brain damage.
My typical examples: "at this point in time," which after John Dean's Watergate testimony completely overwhelmed the plain word "now"; "issue" for "problem"; and "collateral damage" for "dead civilians." More recently I suffer cerebral inflammation every time I hear some zombie politician use "fulsome" to mean "complete" when the word means "insincere flattery."
After yesterday's tweeted mass vaccination by WHO's Gregory Härtl, Flublogia has been well and truly immunized against "SARS-like virus." But a Google search for "sars-like virus" limited to the past 24 hours has turned up hundreds of outbreaks around the world.
I'm afraid this is one pandemic WHO won't be able to stop.
