[plug] stripping potentially nasty attachments

[James Devenish]

It's "viruses", except in Internet chat rooms.

In message <4065133F.5010901 at book-keepingnetwork.com.au>
on Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 01:38:07PM +0800, Alex Polglaze wrote:
> Remember that virus...around a lot longer than computers 

In English medicine, pathology and biology, the plural of "virus" is
"viruses". In these contexts, the English "virus" isn't recognised as
having had the same meaning as it would have had in Latin.

> Remember that virus and virii have been around a lot longer than
> computers and that the context is medical as in infection and
> proliferation.

I think you would be hard pressed to find any evidence that the Latin
plural of "virus" was either "viri" or "virii". (Unless you are telling
us that the plural "virii" can be confidently formed on the basis of
rules -- if so, what is the singular of 'virii'?) And what about
"virology"? I have always been of the understanding that "viri" and
"virii" are slang neologisms (but I don't know the history).

> Computing "stole" the idea and notion from medicine,

True. I would be fascinated to learn that the Latin "virus" could
have included "Microsoft Visual Basic Arbitrary Code Execution" ;)

In message <40650996.3060606 at book-keepingnetwork.com.au>
on Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 12:56:54PM +0800, Alex Polglaze wrote:
> Virus is...like Hippopotamus and octopus, 

Really?

> the plural of these words is...octopi

As far as I know, that's actually debatable for Latin (but fine in
English).

> just like the plural of amoeba is amoebae.

And fora, formulae, fungi, nuclei, termini, et cetera (ha ha ha).
(Although, in Australia, it's for some reason pronounced "form-you-lee"
rather than "form-you-lie".)