the.com/contagion
the idea so good it spreads faster than the disease that named it
means The spreading of something — originally disease, now also emotions, ideas, panic, or behavior — from one person or place to another by contact or proximity.
from From Latin 'contagio,' meaning 'a touching, contact, infection,' built from 'con-' (together) plus a root tied to 'tangere,' to touch — the same root that gives us 'tangent' and 'tactile.' At its heart, contagion is literally a thing caught by touching, and the word kept that physical intimacy even as it spread into the figurative: by the 17th and 18th centuries English speakers were already talking about the contagion of ideas, fear, and laughter, treating the mind as catchable as the body.
- yawning proof
- reading about yawns can make you yawn
- emotional spread
- moods travel through social networks like germs
- R-naught
- one number decides if an outbreak explodes or fizzles
- financial version
- one bank's panic can topple distant economies
- word origin
- Latin contagio, literally a touching together
covid-19 pandemic — began in wuhan, china in december 2019, spread to 195+ countries