The same thing happened to "inoculation" and "vaccination," all examples of extending the meaning from specific to general (or at least broader).
How so, please?
vaccination, is a word formed from vaccine, which is from vaccinus(latin =cows vacca, cow, and actually goes back to sanscrit for cow..)
the first vaccine and vaccinations were treatment that infected you with cow pox-- a disease very similar to small box, but not nearly so deadly.. and not so deforming.
small pox is charactorized by blisters all over the face and upper body. these then swell, fill with fluid, crust, and fall off and leave raw skin.. very ugly. but cow pox? a fever, and pain, and usually only the one blister where you got the infections (for people as old as we are jackie, that is usually the upper arm or thigh) (small pox also creates lesions internally, and these can break down the surface of your lungs, and the internal blisters break down, leading to pnuemonia if you are lucky, or cadio-pulmanary failure if you are unlucky. )
so a vaccination was a treatment to prevent small pox by giving you cowpox--exclusively.. now its used to describe any any treatment that involves creating a mild infection with dead or weakened bacteria, in order to stimulate an immune responce.. and we get vaccinated for polio, and measles, and all sorts of diseases..
inoculate.. carries the word oculus-- or eye! No it wasn't from things being put in the eye, but eye as in eye of needle or eye as a bud.. and the term was used by gardeners when the grafted an eye (bud) of one plant onto an other..
so an inoculation was a process of putting one organism onto another.. and then by extention, implanting something onto another..
its still used in the plant sense, in mexico, corn is inoculated with corn smut, (which has a much nicer and prettier name in spanish). Corn smut is a fungus that produces a kind of black mushroom that the mexican consider a delight, and most american corn farmers consider a blight!
when you have your kids inoculated, you are grafting into them, bacteria.. they don't grown corn smut, but anti bodies.. and so be come immune to what ever has been introduced!
(i have been reading about these words just this week... )
