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Diary

Ian McEwan: The strange vocabulary of coronavirus

24 April 2020

11:00 PM

24 April 2020

11:00 PM

The vocabulary of Brexit has passed into oblivion. Now there’s fresh work to be done. We all know about ‘flattening the curve’, but are you comfortable yet with ‘fomite’, a word my older son, a virologist, taught the family early on? It’s an object or surface on which an infectious agent like a coronavirus might be lying in wait — just for you.

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