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Off-topic, but in recent weeks I've been reminded of a fascinating lecture I once attended by someone who was multilingual about the ways we talk about illness in different languages—English more than any other uses military/war language to describe cures/recovery. https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1246898019720728577
We battle cancer, we fight off a cold, our immune system are our bodies' defenses, pathogens invade you, we are defeated by or victorious over disease, our cells attack pathogens and are destroyed, treatments are aggressive...
cures are a magic bullet, doctors give orders, epidemics are eradicated, treatments are weapons, literally the list seems to go on forever, it was a really "holy shit" moment for me when I realized I'd just been using these terms my whole life without really thinking about it.
There's an argument to be made that all of this serves to dehumanize and atomize the patient, as well as buying into a kind of just-world theory that if you only have enough courage and will (or ammunition), you can overcome even fatal illnesses with impossible odds.
Apparently this is not the case in every language. But if you're an English speaker and trying to frame the pandemic in non-military/war terms, you're in for a struggle.
