tons of viri emails lately

[Perris Calderon]

wow...barraged...cute tricks to get you to open them to, like;

hurry, hurry, you were right!

and ;

"email returned; or ; failure to open:

stuff like this

don't open anything anymore if it comes through electronic mail

I think the next viri varient will be able to install even if it's mailed through ground service.

some of these I'm opening just to see what avg does.

it is very good at spotting the attachments

 

[zeke_mo]

Do you use web based mail or a 3rd party client?

 

[Perris Calderon]

Do you use web based mail or a 3rd party client?

client

 

[zeke_mo]

I dont recal ever getting an email with a virus in it, but I did get an IM on the aol network that wanted me to download something called aim.com. Why cant the internet just be clean :s

 

[sean.ferguson]

I got my first ever worm via email a couple of days ago. I felt quite warm inside

Anyway, Avast! caught it and dealt with it. Was a drug email, one of those medical foundation things.

 

[leedogg]

I use mail washer to filter through this crud before launching outlook. It has a nice virus/spam proof, simple text preview.

 

[Perris Calderon]

mailwasher is a very nice app

 

[j79zlr]

(virii isn't a real word ) though.

Thank you

 

[Perris Calderon]

Thank you

ya, it's not officially a word...mostly because viri is allready a plural of virile...or men...I love using the language as a tool, and I love using words and expressions that aren't "official"...I like the sound of "viri" MUCH better then the sound of "viruses"

a great read from ask jeebs;

Classical Inflections
While one would hope that the authoritative sources would suffice, some writers prefer to maintain the classical inflections on some English words, particularly in technical writing. For example, conflicting indexes/indices and minimums/minima are both easily found, depending on the intended audience and use. In that case, what's the classical plural of virus?
The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion.

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journey Into the Fourth Declension
Some scholars, including Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:
qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum
That seems to be using virus as a genitive, which contradicts the assertion that it's 2nd declension, which would have lead to viri, and supports the 4th declension position. This was brought to my attention by Andreas Waschbuesch, who went on to write:
Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) Exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell


anyway, not too long ago, "isn't" wasn't reallya word or an "official" conjunction, and it was "improper gramma"...now it is...english lives and breaths...we all have fun with it imho

imho
^^^
not an, official word, abbreviation or expression (not yet anyway)...
some of us use it anyway

 

[LeeJend]

Yeah, spam is way up too. I had no spam at all on my private account for 5 years and now all the sudden I have to put all kinds of filters in to block the crap.

I'd love to know who's address book got hacked and my email lifted from it...

 

[NetRyder]

They key is keeping your personal account very private. Give it out only to people you know and trust, and never, ever, EVER post it anywhere on the web. My personal account is still completely spam free. I do get spammed a little on my university and OSNN accounts, but they're the kind of messages that Outlook's spam filter can handle pretty easily.

 

[LordOfLA]

heh maybe I should check my mailserver logs to see just how much is being rejected...