"Virus: (1) orig., venom, as of a snake.... (3) Anything that corrupts or poisons the mind or character; evil or harmful influence." And there is the more nearly accurate one which most of us do not understand, "...any of a kingdom of prokaryotes that consists of nucleic acid within a case of protein..." What we do understand is that whatever the definition, that very small blob of matter can cause great misery in the human body. My own definition would probably not be acceptable for a family newspaper.
An oft-heard phrase in the Grand Valley right now is, "suffering from a virus." According to the paper, there is a major infestation of viri floating around. And they maintain a strict non-discrimination policy. Anybody can entertain one.
Big strong football players are as vulnerable as anybody else. In Los Angeles on that
fateful Sunday of the 30 to 33 loss to the Raiders, John Elway, "suffering from a virus, didn't feel good before the start of the game." He probably felt a lot worse after the game and that little virus didn't help at all.
Whatever venom/virus/prokaryote I have been entertaining has not been a lot of fun, although I didn't have to play a football game. In addition to causing various unpleasant physical symptoms, it turned my brain to oatmeal. I asked my friend the philosopher whether she thought I could get away with a whole column of whining and she said, "Why not? Andy Rooney does it every week."
So, in the tradition of Andy Rooney, entertaining a virus isn't a great way to spend Christmas. It could be worse, though. All those things I should/ought/must do, lose their importance and I simply don't/won't/couldn't care less. Maybe I'll get the rest of my Christmas cards out next year.
Some normally ordinary things take on a special glow.
For example, the frozen chicken potpies and videos that my friend the philosopher brought me became extremely valuable objects. Chicken potpie is the modern version of that old cure-all, chicken soup, and is a lot less trouble to create. The videos are fine entertainment, even the movies you wouldn't dream of seeing if you were healthy. I would even have watched "Ishtar" without a complaint. The stack of new mysteries another friend dropped off from the Library kept me up to my knees in murder and mayhem. Really, things got pretty cushy.
There is yet another kind of virus that my edition of Webster does not mention. The most famous example is Michelangelo, the artful computer virus. This strain of computer virus that showed up last year and threatened to disable 5 million computers worldwide. It lies dormant in the infected computer's memory until the computer's clock reads the birth date of the Renaissance artist, March 6, and then reformats the hard drive, erasing all the data files. This nasty little virus originated in Europe and is spread, not by sharing the same air, but by sharing floppy disks or bulletin boards.
The next time you try to query your credit card company or a store that messed up your account and they tell you the computers are down, just hope that the computers are not "suffering from a virus."
Home computers suffer from various less deadly kinds of "virus" programs inserted by hackers without enough to do. Fortunately, companies have come up with anti-virus programs for those of us who worry about our hard disks. It does seem weird - giving shots to a computer.
In the human body and in the vast computer network "virus" is not unlike that original definition, "venom, as of a snake." But if one of the little beasties can bring 5 million computers to their knees, who am I to complain?