Some Blog Site

First bird flu, now swine flu…

A co-worker and I were wondering what will be next, probably in a year or so. We came up with horse flu and frog flu and fish flu. I think we could come up with the next global scare (remember, you can’t spell pandemic without panic) if we just randomly affix a type of animal the to word flu. No, not the real animal, just its Latin name.

Why is it called the Swine Flu and not the Porcine Flu?

The only answer I could muster is that swine is a noun and porcine is an adjective. That provoked me to wonder “What about avian flu? Isn’t avian an adjective?”

Avian is an adjective, but don’t forget about bird flu. So that’s a toss-up.

Then there was the great Hong Kong flu of 1968. Hong Kong is a proper noun, but that still counts. I suppose the adjective form of the whole term would be “Hong Kong flu-y”, and it would make you a number one super guy. And I will resist the urge to insert a “Kung-Flu Fighting” joke here.

Another flu strain throws a wrench into all these works – the Spanish flu. Spanish is definitely an adjective. The noun would be Spain. But no one calls it Spain flu. So maybe there’s no rule about how to name a flu strain.

I would like the adjective form of flu names. That way we could use all those obscure terms like

• equine flu
• ranine flu
• piscine flu
• bovine flu
• vulpine flu
• lupine flu
• ovine flu
• apian flu
• etc.

Just don’t get the donkey flu.