In the big list of “terms of art in a specific discipline that suddenly everybody is familiar with”, I think that to go with “coronavirus”, “core inflation”, etc. we’ll shortly be adding “cascading failure.”
tags from @brin-bellway
#I desperately want to make an “in the future‚ ‘zoonosis’ will be a word everyone knows” reference here#but I can’t think of a suitable word to stick in there#maybe if I were more fluent in webdev jargon#(…why does that quote not turn up on search engines)#(please tell me somebody knows what I’m talking about)
There’s a fancy word for this phenomenon, used by scientists who study infectious diseases from an ecological perspective: zoonosis. […] It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.
2014 Oct: Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, by David Quammen
I got that off Siderea’s Great Age of Plagues series, though perhaps you got it from elsewhere.
That’s getting at the same idea, yeah, but I don’t think it’s the exact line I was thinking of. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing I saw was a David Quammen author interview, though.)
Update:
“On the first anniversary of my 2020 post “Preparing for the Pandemic: Stage 0”, I wrote a post “The Very Bad News”, in which I said:
[…] the public imagination about climate change has been pretty much exclusively trained to entertain meteorological calamities – storms, mostly – but there are whole other categories.
Such as the epidemiological.
See, even if *this* pandemic wasn’t caused by the Climate Catastrophe, it seems the epidemiologists are expecting the Climate Catastrophe to cause other pandemics and epidemics. There’s a variety of reasons why – I had found a prescient essay from, IIRC, 2015 or so, which I have subsequently lost, which had a sentence to the effect of, “In the future, ‘zoonosis’ is going to be a word everyone knows.” – but we can discuss those later.
Well the actual quote, it turns out, is, as I quoted above, “Zoonosis. […] It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.””
It *feels* like that specific “going to be a word everyone knows” line has been around since the 2010s, but (1) that might not be accurate and (2) 2021 might not be the first time Siderea said it. (She has apparently set her blog to not be indexed by public search engines, and I don’t currently have any plans to ingest it into my personal search engine.)
Tags:
#oh look an update #reply via reblog #apocalypse cw #illness tw #amnesia cw? #climate change
Brinens and Things 
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