Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan: The strange vocabulary of coronavirus

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The vocabulary of Brexit has passed into oblivion. Now there’s fresh work to be done. We all know about ‘flattening the curve’, but are you comfortable yet with ‘fomite’, a word my older son, a virologist, taught the family early on? It’s an object or surface on which an infectious agent like a coronavirus might be lying in wait — just for you. A cheque in the post, next door’s cat, the tennis balls you are about to double-fault with — all good candidates. You knew that already. Then how about ‘lipid envelope’, the outer shell of certain viruses. We learn with relief that the envelope of our coronavirus of concern is easily destroyed by soap and water. More good news: this virus has a genome made of single-stranded RNA that’s far larger or longer than most — 30,000 bases. Viruses mutate randomly at astonishing speed. But this one has to preserve the stability of its unwieldy genome and can’t easily chance upon some even nastier version of itself. Less good news: as it spreads around the globe and its throws of the dice multiply by magnitudes, it could get lucky. Finally, there’s ‘herd immunity’. Christians, who like to refer to themselves as sheep in a flock, will have no problem, but the rest of us are mildly affronted when an epidemiologist or politician refers to us as a herd. Why not ‘popular resistance’? A little inflammatory? It needs a poet’s touch.

Microphones were installed in the House of Commons chamber in 1950. A mere 38 years passed before a parliamentary debate was broadcast on the radio. We would probably blush now to hear the arguments against our being allowed to follow in real time the intricacies of parliamentary debate. But the institutional habit of treating voters like children dies hard.

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