A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

TOUCH ME I'M SICK: As I suffer mildly through a nettlesome acute viral nasopharyngitis -- known to the uninformed as the "common cold," or, inaccurately, "flu" -- it occurs to me that we don't have enough cute nicknames for our diseases these days. Sure, there's occasionally shingles or whooping cough and less-frequently mad cow, but mostly we're so damn clinical. Nobody self-diagnoses ague or grippe. I've never heard of drug-resistant consumption. Gone are the days of the French Disease, which was what you got when you graduated beyond the Kissing Disease. Even yellow fever, which seems like it might be a cool nickname, is an actual scientific diagnosis (and far less evocative than its kicky nickname, "vomito negro"). The last time I remember somebody trying to work a nickname into the popular lexicon was in the early 1980s when idiots were running around trying to pin "gay cancer" on a disease that was neither gay nor cancer (seriously, why not "junkie anemia" or "Haitian pallor"? Not in-your-face enough?). I'm just saying that if you're going to get a disease, it at least should come with an interesting or fearsome-sounding nickname.

Some suggestions:

• Rickets: Don Rickles
  
• Oral gonorrhea: Emma Nelson's Disease
  
• Chronic fatigue syndrome: Fat Charlie the Archangel
  
• E.Coli: Gratuitous Punctuation
  
• Tetanus: Careless Hippies' Folly
  
• Measles: Hot Freckles