In the wikipedia article on plantar’s warts: they have a graphic image of an excised wart. The thing is not tiny. But since these ‘warts’ are really a virus, how can they ‘exist’ physically like that?
That is, HPV is a microscopic virus, how does it somehow have substantial physical substance and get that big? I dont get it. Is that flesh human or HPV?
Another graph says that “every wart has its own blood supply and nerves”, but how does it get that? Does our body say, “What the f***, give 'em some free juice!”?
You are laboring under a misconception. The wart isn’t a virus. The virus infects skin cells, causing them to divide at a high rate. These infected cells form the wart.
And I’d say the data is pretty clear that day-to-day speech always wins in the end.
I don’t even care whether or not “virus” was a masculine second declension term in some other guy’s language.
If you go to slashdot right now and post either of those spellings in any topic, perhaps just the single word, you should be able to start a nice cascade of pedantic nerdosity.
I’m sorry, but I must insist you turn in your pedant’s badge.
“Virii,” like penii and octopi, is pseudo-Latin. It’s the sort of thing that makes you look knowledgeable to the ignorant, but ignorant to the knowledgeable.
Viruses are not even microscopic, not the way that term is normally used to mean visible in a light microscope. When I worked in a lab studying T-viruses 56 years ago we used an electron microscope to see them. And “viruses” was the only plural used in that lab. Or any other, I imagine.
Just an aside. I have started using “phenonums” having seen “phenonas” once too often. Some usage book I once saw said that in English, -s plurals are wrong only for old strong nouns, like “mouse”, but acceptable on all foreign borrowings. For example, I have studied things called toposes. Some ignorant pedants used the plural “topi” which might have been right if the singular had been topus and borrowed from Latin. Finally a less ignorant person discovered that the correct Greek plural was “topoi” and now half the people use the one and half the other. But if you use the Greek plural, aren’t you also constrained to inflect it for case? Sigh.
In a nutshell, it says, “‘Viruses’ is correct, but here’s what you need to know in case you get into an argument about it…”
Funny thing is that Latin had a similar relationship to Greek. The Romans adopted a lot of Greek nouns – some of them completely assimilated to Latin morphology, and others with Greek morphologies rendered in Latin characters.
Nah. English handles number through morphology, but this is not true of case (except for certain pronouns). So, English handles alternate plurals like a champ, because there’s a niche for it in the language. Unlike plurals, there is no pre-established space for case morphology in English.
Ok, let me play lil’ bo peep and move this thread back to the original subject and ask another foolish question: Why does the virus make the body create a ‘wart’? What benefit does the HPV get from this? It makes it more likely that the person will try to destroy the HPV.
And also, if the wart is not the HPV itself, if you get rid of a wart, does that mean the HPV is gone? Are the wart and HPV one and the same or not? What if the wart is freezed-off and killed, does that mean you are cured?
