Word Stories: shingles

June 29, 2015 10:00

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Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

Medical science has made great strides in treating many illnesses. It has made even greater strides in naming diseases. As in many professions (teaching English included), a change of terminology can at least give the illusion of progress, if not always the substance. People no longer suffer from ague (an acute fever, often malarial), consumption (a wasting disease, often TB) or the quinsy (tonsilitis). Twenty-first century patients demand twenty-first century names for their conditions, preferably something scientific-sounding, or maybe a ‘syndrome’ named after some respected physician.

However, some old names survive. Leprosy is still around, plague is still with us, people still suffer from gout – all of which sound rather old-fashioned. And people still come down with shingles, which definitely smacks of the eighteenth century. And the reason shingles was on my mind was that a friend of mine recently suffered from it and none of us knew why it was called shingles.

Shingles doesn’t start as shingles. It starts as chickenpox, a common childhood illness. Pox is an altered plural of pock (pustule or ulcer, possibly related to words like pocket and pouch) and also appears in smallpox. This disease was so called to distinguish it from the great pox (syphilis, also known as, with no regard for political correctness, the French or Spanish pox). It’s not clear where the ‘chicken’ in chickenpox comes from. Samuel Johnson thought it may be from the mildness of the disease, but it’s also been suggested that it could have something to do with the resemblance between the red marks produced by the disease and chick peas.

When your body gets over chickenpox, the virus hangs out in your nervous system, in the general region of your spinal cord. It lies there dormant, often for decades, until your immune system is weakened by stress, aging or another illness. It then reactivates and some of the viruses travel down the nerves to the skin, where they cause pain and a rash. This usually happens on one side of the body around the waistline. And that’s why the disease is called shingles. It comes from the Latin cingulum, ‘girdle, belt’.

Тема: Grammar & Vocabulary Теги: Wordstory, Etymology

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