By Any Other Name.(The Talk of the Town)(swine influenza)

Last week, there were a lot of questions about swine flu, not the least of which was what to call it. An Israeli health minister, loath to utter the words, attempted to rename the virus the "Mexican flu." The hog farmers and the pork processors proposed the "North American influenza," while the North American politicians were pushing "the H1N1 virus," a designation that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack--a Democrat, not incidentally, from Iowa--said he deemed "very, very important." By Wednesday, it was official: the swine flu, according to the federal government, was no longer the swine flu; it was the "2009 H1N1 Flu." In a hearing before the Health and Human Services subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Tom Harkin, another Iowan, had expressed to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his own confusion:

HARKIN: Dr. Fauci, in my opening statement I kept referring to it as the so-called swine flu. Now, please instruct me in this. I've been told that it doesn't necessarily come from pigs. . . . But it has a swine gene? . . . , FAUCI: This particular virus, this H1N1 we're calling "swine flu," has genetic elements from a human influenza, genetic elements from a pig influenza, and genetic elements from an avian influenza. . . . , HARKIN: I've heard that a more correct terminology for this might be a Northern American virus., FAUCI (smiling uncomfortably): Well . . . I wouldn't want to go there, Senator.

Swine flu. Febbre suina. Schweine-grippe. However you said it, there was something discomfiting about the phrase, which somehow sounded both Biblical and futuristic, as though it were the humanity-annihilating plague in a Will Smith film. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "swine" derives from the Old English swin, referring to bristle-bearing, non-ruminant hoofed mammals, and the perceived qualities thereof, almost none of which are salutary. In Chaucer, a noblewoman berates a group of beggars: "masty swyn, ye ydel ...