Scholars then adopted the Latin plural of "fomes", "fomites" (foe-mee-tays) to mean "different kinds of tinder" (i.e. different vectors of infection) After a few hundred years, English-speaking epidemiologists started saying this as two syllables, "foe-mights"
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And from this they got the completely incorrect singular back-formation "fomite", meaning "a surface that carries germs" A word we all learned in 2020
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So if you heard that the possibility of getting COVID-19 from doorknobs or grocery bags was called "fomite transmission", but you didn't know what a "fomite" actually is, the answer is it isn't anything and British doctors back in the day were just uneducated yahoos
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I have a genuine appreciation for the word "bungled." Everyone forgets it exists until it's exactly the word you need.
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