I am writing an essay about the dehumanization of Jewish people during the Holocaust. Does the sentence “treated Jews like a virus that contaminated the meaning of humanity” sound weird?
Yes. What’s the entire sentence?
To be honest, that’s all I needed to hear. I’ll find a way to rephrase it properl
Thanks
Given that the Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as vermin maybe that word ties in better?
very helpful
Yes, that works. Thank you.
Strike that, what you really want is parasite,
Agreed. And I think, as vermin, they “contaminated the lifeblood of humanity”. It sounds odd to say “the meaning of humanity” here. At least to my ears.
Great notes.
The weird part of the sentence is “the meaning of”.
Meanings don’t get contaminated by viruses. That makes it a badly mixed metaphor.
But “treated Jews like a virus that contaminated humanity” flows a lot better and probably expresses what you’re after a lot more clearly.
I see I’m not the first.
Yea, that was my hang-up as well. I was also thinking, “tainted the purity of humanity” or something like that as well. But after reading your sentence, I agree that simply just “humanity” works well.
Instead of saying the nasty thing and assuming that the reader understands that’s not your own belief, quote a nasty person saying what they themselves believed. The Nazis made a propaganda film “The Eternal Jew” that’s full of them telling on themselves.
You need a subject for sure.
Sorry, to be clearer, I meant you’re sentence needs a subject, you already have a topic.
Yes, wierd.
Viruses don’t ‘contaminate’, they ‘infect’ or ‘spread’.
And not ‘the meaning of humanity’ – ‘the body of humanity’ might be effective for such a medical metaphor.