Pandemic notes 5.0: Mutant swarms and Nashian furfurs

by David Benjamin

“In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague, every man becomes… a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear and despair.”

— John Kelly, The Great Mortality

MADISON, Wis. —  The Covid-19 pandemic has swollen the English lexicon and turned a host of obscure medical terms into household words. My word of the week, for example, emerging in reports of the latest research, is “614G,” which designates a mutation to the coronavirus that began to flourish between March and June. The significance of the 614G mutation is that it seems to have accelerated the bug’s ability to spread from person to person, at a rate — according to scientists who’ve cited its potency — as high as twenty percent.

For anyone (like me) whose response to Covid is to read up on it avidly, the tendency of viruses to mutate prolifically is common knowledge. Viruses are primitive parasites that reproduce both voluminously and sloppily. Perhaps the most harrowing example of viral mutation is chronicled in John M. Barry’s magisterial history of the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza.  

Barry reveals that the so-called “Spanish flu,” whose likelier origin was an Army boot camp in Haskell County, Kansas, was virulent and pandemic through its first wave, leaping the Atlantic on troop ships to ravage French, German, British and American forces fighting World War I. But it was not as deadly as its offspring, a “mutant swarm” that incubated over the summer of 1918 (not unlike the summer of 2020) and turned cities and small towns alike into charnel houses. “All over the world,” wrote Barry, “the virus was adapting to humans, achieving maximum efficiency. And all over the world, the virus was turning lethal.”

Also among terms that have gained an almost viral currency is “covid fatigue.” I found testimony to this phenomenon in the first disease book I read this year, The Plague by Albert Camus, a novel about a fictional pestilence — but based on real experience — in North Africa. The tendency of people to weary of the outbreak after months of mass suffering — their urge to grow careless of public health rules, to succumb to despair, laugh in the face of death or turn ruthless and callous — is a classic symptom of pandemic. 

Daniel Defoe describes an identical onset of despair in A Journal of the Plague Year, about the London plague of 1665. And Barry describes its effect in Philadelphia in the gruesome fall of 1918: “Fear began to break down the community… Trust broke down. Signs began to surface of not just edginess but anger, not just finger-pointing or protecting one’s own interests but active selfishness in the face of general calamity. The hundreds of thousands of sick in the city became a great weight dragging upon it. And the city began to implode in chaos and fear.”

Among the Covid coinages most ingenious but also least likely to survive the scourge is apérue, a French — actually Parisian — portmanteau that combines “apéro,” common slang for the habit of an evening drink, or apéritif, with “rue,” or street. Since people could not go to cafés and bars for their apéro, they drank it in the street. Hence “apéru”!

I wonder, a year or so after the vaccine has saved us, whether many of us will be able to explain terms like mRNA, R0, PPE, CPR, LAMP, ARDS, immunity license, cytokine storm, vector and zoonosis, not to mention the Four Horsemen of Covid Diagnosis: Symptomatic, Asymptomatic, Pre-Symptomatic and Oligo-Symptomatic. Will we remember the little Asian critters — horseshoe bats, pangolins and civets — that got the rap for starting the whole fiasco? And will the word “superspreader,” made vernacular by Donald Trump’s barnstorming airplane-hangar tour of battleground America, become a lasting metaphor for delusional mobs worshipping blowhards in badly ventilated bedlamscapes? 

Besides the torrent of new and obscure words propagated by SAS-Cov-2 (its official name, by the way), my reading conveyed me to dozens of pestilential terms that range from chilling to whimsical. The most prolific disease-dropper among my readings is Sean Martin, author of A Short History of Disease. 

Martin cites, often vividly, a smorgasbord of ghastly ills that have afflicted man and beast from cavedwellers to covid, among them hemiplegia, pellagra, diphtheria, tularemia, dropsy, cholera, scrofula, taterapox, beriberi, St. Anthony’s fire, St. Vitus’ dance, Sydenham’s chorea, Pott’s disease, bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic plague, scurvy, leprosy, lupus vulgaris, anthrax, erysipelas, typhus, of course, puerperal fever, yellow fever, kuru, yaws, rinderpest, trypanosomiasis, amebiasis, dracunculiasis, schistosomiasis of the rectum, phthisis, syphilis (also known as the great pox, the Spanish disease, the French disease, the pox of Naples, the Portuguese disease, the Castilian disease, the British disease, the disease of the Turks, the Christian disease, the country sickness and the Serpent), and the mysterious English sweate, not to mention liver flukes, scabies, fungus, worms, rats, tarabagans, fleas, lice, locusts and rabid polecats.

My favorite lexical discovery in Martin’s infectious prose, is “furfuraceous.” Although it’s a word unfamiliar to most of us, I found it right there in Webster. “Furfur” is, actually, a synonym for “dandruff,” but it also denotes scaliness and a sort of unsightly flakiness of the flesh or other tissues. However, the first thing that came to my mind as I encountered the word was Ogden Nash. 

Nash, after all, is the author of “Fleas” (Adam/ had ’em). If he never seized the opportunity to slip a furfur into one of his poems, it was an oversight he likely regretted on his deathbed.

I have composed below, in Nash’s honor, just one possibility. It’s is entitled “Napoleon.”

His manners, it’s said, were faultlessly gracious, his banquets known far and wide as delacious, his home ostentatious, his Josie fellatious, his lawn an oasius of verdant acacias. His dreams so audacious, so voracious for conquest that he grew insatious, his boasting loquacious, ambition bodacious, his armies invasious, their battles hellacious, his great empire spacious ’til cold contumacious left him frozen in stasis, while his once-luscious hair fell flush to the snow, ferociously flakish and full furfuraceous.

Something like that. 

Among my readings, which I recommend, were Giovanni Boccaccio’s delightful Decameron, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain and John Kelly’s Black Death history, The Great Mortality. But still, the best disease book, because it’s the most fun (really) is Hans Zinsser’s classic 1935 biography of typhus, Rats, Lice and History. It deserves a brief quotation. No one ever wrote better footnotes. This one is about the “nymph” stage in the development of the common louse:

“Nature has provided that the nymph — that is, what may be called the high-school or flapper age of the louse — is not yet possessed of sexual organs. These do not appear until the fully adult form develops, and reproduction is thus postponed until a responsible age is reached. Adolescent Bohemianism, ‘living oneself out,’ ‘self-expression,’ and so forth, never get beyond the D.H. Lawrence stage among the younger set. How much physical hardship and moral confusion could be avoided if a similar arrangement among us could postpone sexual maturity by an internal secretion from the fully established intellectual and moral convolutions of the brain! The loss of copy this would entail for Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and others would be amply compensated by gains in other directions…”