Diarrhoea

Diarrhoea has sat on my requested list of things to write about for a while now and has rarely been a subject that I have felt tempted towards. No one wants to hear personal anecdotes and the subject is one that I have struggled to see an angle for. In the Western World diarrhoea is an uncomfortable and irritating illness, but in underdeveloped countries it is far more serious and the second greatest killer of children, killing more a year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. The main cause is unclean drinking water and UNICEF are one of the charities that are battling to raise funds to take the simple steps necessary to save lives. The gap in wealth between the rich and poor worldwide is absolute insanity and it surprises me that commitment to Third World aid never seems particularly high on the political agenda when it comes to voting time. Surely anyone in a position of power and say-so over public spending needs to be getting this a little bit more right. 

  I hadn't meant to get political; my first thought when discussing diarrhoea was to think about the etymology of world, so here goes. It is always a tricky word to spell with the rogue 'o' seeming to offer very little to the mix. The sound of the word is both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The harsh 'd' sets it off on a dark footing and the words 'dire' and 'ire' both seem relevant to the experience of diarrhoea, but after its unfortunate opening two syllables, it proceeds with a flamboyance and exoticism that goes against its definition, squeezing nine letters snugly into a quadrisyllabic word.

  The word itself, like many of more beautiful words in the English language, comes from Medieval Latin roots. Diarrein in Greek means to flow through and interestingly and slightly weirdly the River Rhine, which flows through seven European countries over 766 miles, comes from the same root word, rhenus being the Latin for flow. It's odd and pleasing that these two words come from the same place and perhaps when we see something beautiful like the Rhine it will be an inspiration to do beautiful things.