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EveryLingua

C2  ·  23 Wörter

Building services

Heat, air and water in a house.

The seventh entry is il rischio di legionella, and the name is the only one on this page that began as a piece of news. In July 1976 a convention of the American Legion met in a Philadelphia hotel; an outbreak of pneumonia followed, and the newspapers were calling it « Legionnaires’ disease » long before anybody knew what caused it. The bacterium found the following year was named after that outbreak, not the outbreak after the bacterium, and the genus has been Legionella ever since. Two habits follow for anybody writing in English. The illness keeps its capital and its apostrophe, « Legionnaires’ disease », because it is still named after those men; the organism, in a plant room or a risk assessment, goes small and bare, « legionella in a dead leg », with no article in front of it. The root under all of it is legio, a levy of troops, from legere, to gather or to choose, and the old word survives for anything past counting: « her admirers are legion ». Italian keeps the same pair, la legionella and la malattia del legionario.

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