What is a bacterial full stop?

These and other insights into how the language of infection is punctuated can be found in a new chapter in LoI: punctuation (highlighted paragraph at the top of Micrognome’s home page).

The comma, full stop, quotation, question and exclamation marks all get a mention. Apostrophies only get a passing nod, though a future post may give this grammatical problem child a special mention.

Micrognome, November, 2011.

Numeracy is a basic life skill so fundamental that we get our first introduction to numbers before going to primary school. Yet, as the saying goes, biologists don’t do math. At least in this respect, clinical microbiologists and infectious disease physicians seem to fit the mould, their preoccupation being with the qualitative aspects of infection: the names of the disease causing agents (nouns) and their consequences (verbs). 

But scratch the surface and you find a discipline teeming with numeric detail from the most basic statistical tests used to appreciate the strength of potential connections, through quantitative assessments of biological burdens to the sophisticated analyses that underly the burgeoning discipline of bioinformatics. Chemistry and physics have long exploited the boundaries of computational mathematics. It seems that biology is the waking giant, stretching its limbs before really learning how to play with numbers

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• other chapters in the Language of Infection

And now for the next instalment in the Language of Infection series; adjetivos.

This will appear shortly as the latest in the series to date on www.priobe.net. In the meantime, here is version 1.0 for your consideration and comment.

Adjectives are the describing words used to give a bit of additional detail to the naming words called nouns. A good place to start is with the adjectives that are used to describe specific infections. These often end in ‘–al’ and show that the infection is associated with that particular microbe.

Verbs; the doing words (verbos)

The commonest forms of greeting are short questions; opening gambits like ‘How are you?’ These are often followed by equally short questions, one of the commonest of which is ‘and what do you do?’  Our contemporary culture defines us according to what we do. Our identity and for some, their meaning in life, is based on occupation: doctor, pathologist, teacher, researcher. And what do you do?

Doing words

This question can be usefully applied to microorganisms. What can each one of them do?  The words used to speak of their actions are the classic doing words; verbs to the grammarian and linguist. Along with substantives (nouns, naming words) verbs lie at the heart of the most basic of sentences. They are so critical to the language we use that some sentences have a single verb as their only word. But before looking at the red-blooded action verbs, there are some basic verbs that hardly get noticed because they are there in everyday us; camouflaged by the mundane functions they serve. These verbs are used to refer to a state of being or having and usually only have a subject. Sounds a little complicated, but that’s because these action words fly under the radar. They include to be, to exist, to survive, to grow, to divide, and to die. The bacteria responsible for tuberculosis; Mycobacterium tuberculosis, therefore survives in phlegm.  It grows in laboratory culture, it divides in order to replicate and it dies when exposed to antimicrobial therapy. Viruses do not survive for long outside a suitable cellular host, in which they replicate and after treatment with antiviral therapy they die.

Intransigent intransitives

Verbs with a subject (the microorganism) but no object are sometimes called “intransitive”, to distinguish them from the vigorous actions packed into transitive verbs that have both subject (microorganism) and object (e.g. victim).  Examples of these red-blooded action words are to colonise, to invade, to infect, to transmit, to inoculate, to cause, to harm and to kill. So Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that causes malaria invades red blood cells and an Anopheles mosquito transmits the infective stage of the parasite, it harms many infected people every year and kills some of them.

You wanted some action, didn’t you?  Well, here’s the next installment in our Language of Infection series, to follow Greetings and Nouns. Let us know what you think, and don’t be afraid to correct points of grammar – they matter.