Virginia Woolf, laid up with the flu, wrote that: “the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Among all the gaping holes and wounds in our collective life that the new coronavirus has revealed is the fact that our public language long ago depleted its resources and then debased itself. We must be the first and only civilization to use a word, “viral” — a term that denotes death and destruction — to signify a quintessentially American form of success.

One would be right to condemn government for not taking the possibility of a viral pandemic seriously. But neither did we. No one would have used the word “metastasize” to describe the effect of someone or something being universally read or seen on the web because we know that cancer kills. But a virus also kills. How could we have been so blind to that?

And now, as if emerging from behind its disgraceful function as a simile, “viral” has returned in its original, primal form to entirely overtake our language.