“If I’m contagious, I may infect other people”: an anatomy of CONTAGION

Since its first identification in early 2020, the new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 has quickly spread around the world, and the OMS declared the outbreak of a pandemic in March 2020. Since the early months of the pandemic, the attention of scientists, politicians and citizens has been drawn to the spreading of the virus, thus making the concept of contagion salient in daily news reports. In Italian, expressions such as ‘il numero dei contagi’ became popular, as well as preoccupations regarding the number of contagiati, i.e., people who contracted the virus. Crucially, a direct translation of this lexical item into English is not possible, as it lacks the verbal lexical item in the semantic domain of contagion.Several dictionaries consistently report the verb “to infect” as a translation for It. contagiare, but specialised, medical terminology specifies a difference between the two conditions (i.e., an infection is different from a contagion).