groove / in the groove / groovy

24 March 2025

Most of us probably associate the slang word groovy with 1960s counterculture, but it’s considerably older than that, with the slang sense arising in 1930s jazz jargon. And the metaphorical sense of groove is even older.

Groove was borrowed from the Dutch groeve in the fifteenth century. It is cognate with the noun grave, as a place of burial, which traces back to Old English and on to a common Germanic root. Groove originally meant a mine shaft or pit, but by the mid seventeenth century, the meaning of groove had widened to refer to a channel through which something could flow or slide. And by the turn of the twentieth century, the spiral cuts in a phonograph cylinder or record were being called grooves, a development that probably influenced the jazz senses of the word.

Groove acquired the figurative sense of a routine action, a way of life, a “rut” by the mid nineteenth century. We see this figurative use in Alfred Tennyson’s 1842 poem Locksley Hall in a passage extolling the virtues of progress in the Victorian Age:

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

This sense of a figurative groove by which something can travel appears in the world of sports writing by the 1920s. Here is an example of a baseball pitch being in the groove from the 9 March 1927 issue of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Daily Argus-Leader:

When Babe Ruth comes to bat at a critical time in a tight baseball game what does the opposing pitcher do? Does he send one right “in the groove” where the famous slugger can put in his healthiest wallop? Assuredly not. He either walks Ruth, or tries to put one across where it is hardest for the home run king to swing.

Or this one from the world of golf in the 25 August 1927 issue of the Atlanta Journal by golf writer O. B. Keeler:

Big Bob Jones said later that in his opinion that putt was the best shot he ever had seen Bobby play. Certainly he has played few, if any, of greater importance. He had even more of a sidehill track than his opponent. He borrowed approximately three feet from the slope, and the ball, struck with exemplary firmness and crispness, took the curve as if in a groove and went into the middle of the cup as if drawn by a magnet.

The phrase in the groove moved from sports to other human endeavors, as is witnessed by this 5 March 1928 advertisement in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch for a bank:

In a Groove

When a golfer; a tennis player, a trapshooter, or any other sportsman gets into his stride—in a streak of winning—he says he is “in a groove.” He just feels as if he cannot fail. Peculiar, isn’t it?

And then he gets into a groove of losing. He just feels he cannot win. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Some people are like that in money matters. Some are in a groove of spending—and some are in a groove of saving. Many are in a groove of depositing with us at 6%. There’s nothing peculiar about that.

The Brunson Bank & Trust Co.

And Keeler returns on 24 June 1932 with this use of the verb to groove:

Gene put in a good many hours, split up into thirty-minute periods, swinging that double-weight driver.

“You can’t hit with it,” he said. “You have to swing it, I think it tends to groove my swing, and to give me control of the wallop, when I’m using my regular club. Of course I may be wrong.

In a groove is attested to in a musical context in October 1932 by this quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary from the magazine Melody Maker:

Having such a wonderful time which puts me in a groove.

Four years later, in the 28 November 1936 issue of Melody Maker, this advertisement for Buescher trumpets and cornets ran:

EVERY TONE RIGHT “IN THE GROOVE”

Buescher “centered intonation” means exactly what it says. There is no cutting the corners—every tone is right “down the middle,” responds perfectly and accurately without favoring or forcing.

And the verb to groove, in a musical context, appeared in the November 1935 issue of Vanity Fair. This snippet is from a “sample” of jazz jargon, created by the article’s authors to show off various slang terms:

That’s the third date we’ve grooved half a dozen schmaltzy tunes for that wand-waver with never a swing item on the list.

And groovey is recorded in the journal American Speech in February 1937:

GROOVEY. Name applied to state of mind which is conducive to good playing.

The musical in the groove hit the big time in a profile of bandleader Benny Goodman in the 17 April 1937 issue of the New Yorker:

With the resurrection of true jazz, a new, richly expressive jargon has been developed which helps to explain just what swing is. The musical phrases which constitute a swing style are called licks, riffs, or get-offs. They are what a sender (hot star) or rideman (super-sender, creator of a style) gives when, feeling his stuff, he is in the groove and goes to town, or out of the world, or gets off on it.

And in October of the year, an article in American Speech defined the term as it was used in the New Yorker piece:

IN THE GROOVE. Play which is finished and of such quality as to be suitable for recording. A hot man is said to be in the groove if he is playing in his best style and ability. A band is in the groove if it is playing smoothly and in a well practiced fashion. This phrase applies to play anywhere, not only in the studio.

From there, in the groove and groovy persisted in musician slang until it blossomed in the counterculture of the 1960s. That’s how a fifteenth century borrowing from Dutch made its way to Woodstock.

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Sources:

“The Battle Is On.” Daily Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 9 March 1927, 6/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Buescher True Tone Trumpets & Cornets” (advertisement). Melody Maker, 28 November 1936, 12/1. Worldradiohistory.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., groove, n.2, groove, v., groovy, adj.2.

Keeler, O. B. “This Game of Golf.” Daily Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), 24 June 1932, 15/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Sudden Death Events Over with Von Elm a Casualty.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 25 August 1927, 12/1–2, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“In a Groove” (advertisement). Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 5 March 1928, 10/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Nichols, E. J. and W. L. Werner. “Hot Jazz Jargon.” Vanity Fair, 45.3, November 1935, 38. Vanity Fair Archive.

Nye, Russel B. “A Muscian’s Word List.” American Speech, 12.1, February 1937, 45–48 at 46/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. groove, n., groove, v., groovy, adj.

Steig, Henry Anton. “Profiles: Alligators’ Idol.” New Yorker, 17 April 1937. 31–38 at 31/3. New Yorker Archive.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall.” In Poems, vol. 2 of 2. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1842, 2:110. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Webb, H. Brook. “The Slang of Jazz.” American Speech, 12.3, October 1937, 179–184 at 184/1. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Gina B., 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

truthiness

21 March 2025

In today’s usage, truthiness is inextricably linked with comedian/talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who used the word on the premiere, 17 October 2005 episode of his television show The Colbert Report (2005–14). Truthiness, as used by Colbert, is the truth as we wish it to be, what we know in our gut as opposed to what we know in our brain. In the show, Colbert parodied television pundits who invent facts to support their opinions and ignore evidence that doesn’t. In the very segment in which he introduced the word, Colbert went on to give an example of how truthiness works:

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard . . . in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the word police, the wordinistas over at Webster’s are gonna say, “hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Like the show on which it appeared, the word became a big hit. Most uses of truthiness have been in discussion of Colbert’s show, but there have been enough uses outside the context of the program to consider this sense of truthiness to be something more than a mere stunt word. The American Dialect Society named truthiness as the Word of the Year for 2005, as did Merriam-Webster for 2006.

Colbert, while clearly the source for the current definition and popularity of the word, is not the first to ever use truthiness. The word appears in John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae #60, originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February 1832, one of a long series of imaginary dialogues between a set of characters, both imaginary and based on real people, conducted in Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh. But Wilson uses truthiness to mean truthfulness, faithfulness, not at all the same thing as Colbert’s usage:

I did not come here to hear you speak truth during the rest of the evening. You do not speak truth well, North; at the same time, I do not deny that you may possess very considerable natural powers of veracity—of truth-telling; but then, you have not cultivated them, having been too much occupied with the ordinary affairs of life. Truthiness is a habit, like every other virtue.

The word in this older sense also appears twice in the memoirs of Joseph John Gurney. The first, apparently penned in 1837, reads:

Truly may it be said, that her valuable qualities have been sanctified; whilst her play of character has not been lost, but has been rendered more interesting than before. Every one who knows her is aware of her truthiness, and appreciates her kindness.

And there is this from 5 August 1844, where he notes the irony that the contradictions in the Bible demonstrate the authenticity of the writing:

How delightful have the Scriptures been to me of late season! I have been struck with the truthiness which is so evident in their apparent contradictions. These are generally capable of being reconciled; they do indeed mark the genuineness and authenticity of the whole.

The word has undoubtedly been independently coined several times over the decades and centuries, but finding actual uses in print is a rare occurrence. So while truthiness, meaning the quality of being truthful, has been in occasional use of the last couple of centuries, Stephen Colbert can lay fair claim to coining the twenty-first century sense of the word.

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Sources:

Glowka, Wayne, et al. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 81.2, Summer 2006, 180–202 at 199–200. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2006-012.

Gurney, Joseph John. Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney, with Selections from His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, ed. Philadelphia: Lippencott, Grambo, 1854, 1.252 and 2.443. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. truthiness, n.

Wilson, John. “Noctes Ambrosianae, No. LX.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 31.190, February 1832, 255–88 at 272. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Benjamin. “Truthiness or Trustiness?” Language Log, 26 October 2005.

Image credit: The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, 2005. Fair use of a low-resolution still image from the television to illustrate the topic under discussion.

triumph

The Triumph of Titus and Vespasian, Giulio Romano, c. 1540

19 March 2025

The word triumph comes to us from Latin, but its usual meaning in that language is not the one we commonly give to it in English. To the ancient Romans, a triumphus was a parade celebrating a great military victory. The victorious general would ride a chariot through the streets of Rome to the steps of the Senate, a slave standing beside him holding a crown of laurels over his head. The general’s army would follow, leading the defeated enemy commander, captured slaves, and great wagons of spoils from the victory. The day was a holiday, and the entire city would turn out to cheer, to feast, and to drink. Roman poets also used the word triumphus to refer to the victory itself, as did later prose writers in Imperial Rome. But this second sense was relatively rare in Latin, and the word usually referred only to the procession and accompanying celebrations.

But in medieval Anglo-Latin we see the sense of triumph meaning the victory itself, not just its celebration. Here is an example from Bede’s c. 731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in a hymn that uses victory in battle as a metaphor for virginity, 4.20, 398.

Multus in orbe uiget per sobria corda triumphus, sobrietatis amor multus in orbe uiget.

(Much triumph flourishes in the world through sober hearts; much love of sobriety flourishes in the world.)

But triumph was not borrowed into English during the pre-Conquest period. I know of one example of the word in an English text, but it is an example of the Latin word appearing in an English text, not an anglicization of the Latin. That text is the translation of the history of the world written by Orosius, a late Roman historian. The translator uses triumphan—the Latin root with an Old English accusative suffix—and adds a lengthy note not contained in the Latin original on the meaning of the word, thus indicating that it was not familiar to his audience:

Þæt hy triumphan heton, þæt wæs þonne hy hwylc folc mid gefeohte ofercumen hæfdon, þonne wæs heora þeaw þæt sceoldon ealle hyra senatus cuman ongean hyra consulas æfter þæm gefeohte, syx mila from ðære byrig, mid crætwæne, mid golde & mid gimstanum gefrætwedum, and hi sceoldon bringan feowerfetes twa hwite. Þonne hi hamweard foran, þonne sceoldon hyra senatus ridan on crætwænum wiðæftan þam consulum, and þa menn beforan him dryfan gebundene þe þær gefangene wæron, ðæt heora mærþa sceoldon þe þrymlicran beon.

(They called that a triumph, that was when they had overcome a nation in battle, then it was their custom that all the senators should come out to meet their consuls after the battle, six miles from the city with a chariot adorned with gold and gemstones, and they should bring two white four-footed animals. Then as they went homeward, the senators would ride in chariots behind the consuls and the men who had been captured would be driven bound before them, so that their glory should be more magnificent.)

Triumph really makes its English appearance in the late fourteenth century, when it is used both to mean a victory celebration and the victory iteself. Geoffrey Chaucer uses the word in his poem Anelida and Arcite, written c. 1375, which opens with a description of a triumph given for Theseus following his conquest of the Scythians. Yes, the context is Athenian, not Roman, but medieval poets aren’t known for being scrupulous about historical accuracy, and the change of venue shows that Chaucer is using the word in a context a bit broader than Roman history:

With his tryumphe and laurer-corouned thus,
In al the flour of Fortunes yevynge
Let I this noble prince Theseus
Toward Athenes in his wey rydinge,
And founde I wol in shortly for to bringe
The slye wey of that I gan to write,
Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite.

(With his triumph and thus laurel-crowned in all the flower of Fortune’s bounty, I leave this noble prince Theseus riding on his way toward Athens, and I will soon try to bring about the sly way in which I began to to write of Queen Anelida and the false Arcite.)

Chaucer is still using the word in the sense of a victory processional, but at around the same time John Trevisa uses triumph to refer to a victory itself in his translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon:

Atte laste Maxencius was overcome atte brydge Pount Milenum, and Constantine went to Rome, and made peynte the signe and tokene of þe crosse in þe riȝt hondes of þe ymages þat senatoures hadde arered in worschippe of his triumphis and of his victorie, and he made write underneþe, “Þis is þe signe and tokene of þat God of lyf þat may nouȝt be overcome.”

(At last Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge, and Constantine when to Rome and had the sign and token of the cross painted onto the right hands of the images that the senators had erected to honor his triumph and victory, and he caused to have written underneath, “This is the sign and token of the God of life that may not be defeated.”)

Since the late fourteenth century, both senses, the historical sense referring to a Roman victory celebration and a more general one referring a victory or great achievement have been in common use in English.

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Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 4.20, 398.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 43–49, 377.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century (1874), vol. 5. John Trevisa, trans. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Kraus Reprint, 1964, 121–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. triumphus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. triumphe, n.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2016, 2.4, 112–15.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, triumph, n., triumph, v.

Image credit: Giulio Romano, c. 1540. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

spendthrift / dingthrift

17 March 2025

Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money.

The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s 1582 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things). Batman adds the following commentary to Bartholomæus’s section on gold:

Golde maketh wise men glad: and spendthrifts mad.

Preceding spendthrift by a couple decades is dingthrift, that is someone who dings or smashes their savings. Ding has ameliorated over the centuries; now it means a minor blow or strike, while in the past it was more forceful. We see dingthrift in Thomas Drant’s 1566 translation of one of Horace’s satires:

I woulde the not a nipfarthinge,
nor yet a niggarde haue,
Wilte thou therefore, a drunkard be,
a dingthrifte, and a knaue?

And a nipfarthing is a miser (as is a niggard, a word which is etymologically unrelated to the n-word but whose use in present-day discourse should be avoided for obvious reasons). This is the earliest known use of nipfarthing, too.

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. Batman vppon Bartholme His Booke De proprietatibus rerum. Stephen Batman, trans. London: Thomas East, 1582, 16.4, 254. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Horace. “The Fyrst Satyre.” In A Medicinable Morall, that Is, the Two Bookes of Horace His Satyres. Thomas Drant, trans. London: Thomas Marshe, 1566, sig. A6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. spendthrift, n. & adj., spend, v.1, thrift, v.1; third edition, March 2021, dingthrift, n., ding, v.1.; September 2003, nipfarthing, n.

Image credit: Jiří Bubeníček, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

virus / viral

Influenza viruses under an electron microscope

14 March 2025

[15 March edit: corrected Proto-Indo-European roots]

Virus is a word that has evolved alongside the evolution in medical knowledge; before the twentieth century a virus was something quite different from the microorganisms we assign the name to today, and even more recently the word has broken the bounds of biology and infected the realm of silicon and circuits.

Virus is from Latin, where the word means poison, venom, or a bodily discharge such as pus or semen. In classical Latin it only referred to animal semen but was extended to human semen in medieval Latin. Because of this last meaning, it’s tempting to associate the word with vir, meaning man and the source of the English word virile, but it appears as if the root of virus is quite different, and there are apparently no Latin uses of virus to refer to human semen. The Latin vir comes from the Proto Indo-European root *uiH-ró-, associated with masculinity and warriors and giving rise to other words such as violence and virtue, while virus comes from the PIE root *ueis-, associated with poison.)

The word makes its English debut toward the end of the fourteenth century. It appears in John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properites of Things) where, citing Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, it associates virus, in the human semen sense, with the Latin vir, man:

Among the genitals on hatte þe pyntyl, veretrum in latyn, for it is a man his owne membre oþir for it is shamefast membre oþir for virus come ouȝt þerof. For propirliche to speke, þe humour þat comeþ out of mankynde hatte virus. So seiþ Isidre.

(Among the genitals, the penis is called veretrum in Latin, for it a man’s own member, first because it is a shameful member, second because virus comes out of it. To speak correctly, the humor that comes out of mankind is called virus. So says Isidore.)

Around the same time, virus appears in the sense of pus or discharge from a wound in a translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s treatise on surgery:

If þe vlcus be virulent, þat is to seie venemi [. . .] If þe virus be wiþoute heete & þe membre haue noon heete, waische it wiþ watir.

(If the ulcer is virulent, that is to say with venom [. . .] If the virus is without heat and the limb has no heat, wash it with water.)

A couple of centuries later the Latin sense of virus as poison entered English usage. This use appears in a figurative sense in the 1599 publication of Master Broughton’s Letters:

In an epistle to the Lord Treasurer, you will put his Graces fame in print: in your letters to D. Stoll. you will set his Graces fame past cure: in priuate letters to himselfe, belching out vnsauourie menaces of that, which here you haue disgorged. Wherein you haue spent all the vires and power you haue for the defence of a vaine paradox, and spit out all the virus and poyson you could conceiue, in the abuse of his reuerend person.

And the virus-as-poison sense can still be found in current usage, as this 1988 citation from the Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria, Ohio shows:

Farmers cut the legs off woolen stockings to wear on wrists and forearms, for the virus of a snake bite would be absorbed by the woolen yarn, minimizing the danger of infection.

The modern biological sense of virus as a microscopic pathogen appears in 1900. From the Journal of Comparative Pathology and Therapeutics of that year:

Thanks to the researches of Löffler, we also know that the virus of foot-and-mouth disease passes through a Berkefeld filter when it is suspended in a watery liquid, but it is arrested by such a filter from an albuminous liquid, and, presumably on account of its small size, it has not yet been made visible to the human eye.

As this citation shows, viruses were originally distinguished from bacteria and other microorganisms by their size. Filters could trap bacteria, but viruses were small enough to pass through them. As a result, many very small microorganisms were originally classified as viruses, although we wouldn’t do so today. Today, a virus is a DNA or RNA molecule surrounded by a protein coat that can only exhibit biological functions inside a host cell. Alexander Nelson’s 1946 Principles of Agricultural Botany exhibits this modern understanding of what a virus is:

Some viruses have been isolated from the host, and all have proved to be some form of nucleic acid; they are of the nature of nucleo-proteins.

And even more recently, a new type of virus has been envisioned, the computer virus, appearing first in fictional accounts of future technologies. Science fiction often invents technologies that only later become a reality. Jules Verne anticipated the submarine and scuba gear in his 1869 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and H. G. Wells wrote about atomic bombs in 1914. Computer viruses are another technology that first appears in fiction. The first known reference to a computer virus is in David Gerrold’s novel 1972 novel When Harlie Was One. Gerrold specifically modeled the concept on pathogenic biological viruses:

“Do you remember the VIRUS program?”

“Vaguely. Wasn’t it some kind of computer disease or malfunction?”

“Disease is closer. There was a science-fiction writer once who wrote a story about it—but the thing had been around a long time before that. It was a program that—well, you know what a virus is, don’t you? It’s pure DNA, a piece of renegade genetic information. It infects a normal cell and forces it to produce more viruses—viral DNA chains—instead of its normal protein. Well, the VIRUS program does the same thing.”

“Huh?”

Handley raised both hands, as if to erase his last paragraph. “Let me put it another way. You have a computer with an auto-dial phone link. You put the VIRUS program into it and it starts dialing phone numbers at random until it connects to another computer with an auto-dial. The VIRUS program then injects itself into the new computer. Or rather, it reprograms the new computer with a VIRUS program of its own and erases itself from the first computer. The second machine then begins to dial phone numbers at random until it connects with a third machine. You get the picture?”

[. . .]

“You could set the VIRUS program to alter information in another computer, falsify it according to your direction, or just scramble it at random, if you wanted to sabotage some other company.”

Gerrold’s VIRUS was a specific program with that name (he also envisioned an anti-virus program called VACCINE), but it wasn’t long before other writers had picked up the idea. John Brunner’s 1975 science fiction classic The Shockwave Rider features computer viruses and coins the use of worm in relation to such programs:

If I’d had to tackle the job, back when they first tied the home-phone service into the net, I’d have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail.

And from the June 1982 issue (#158) of the comic Uncanny X-Men:

We simply design an open-ended virus program to erase any and all references to the X-Men and plug it into a central federal data bank. From there, it’ll infect the entire system in no time.

But by the time that X-Men comic hit the newsstands, the first real computer virus was already in existence. A ninth-grader in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania wrote the “Elk Cloner” virus in 1981, that spread among Apple II computers via infected floppy disks. By modern standards, Elk Cloner was pretty harmless, although it was persistent and was still being spotted a decade later. It wasn’t until 1984 that computer scientists started publishing papers using the term virus.

The adjective viral makes its debut in 1948, originally restricted to characterizations of the biological entity. But like the move to computers, the adjective has infected another domain, that of marketing. Viral marketing appears in 1989, referring to word-of-mouth advertising. From the magazine PC User of 27 September 1989:

At Ernst & Whinney, when Macgregor initially put Macintosh SEs up against a set of Compaqs, the staff almost unanimously voted with their feet as long waiting lists developed for use of the Macintoshes. The Compaqs were all but idle. John Bownes of City Bank confirmed this. “It's viral marketing. You get one or two in and they spread throughout the company.”

The advent of public access to the internet meant that viral marketing itself could go viral. From the New York Times of 30 August 2001:

Many of the new games are viral, meaning that they permit players to spread the games by e-mail to friends.

And from a 2004 essay by Andrew Boyd that uses go viral to refer to the initial efforts of the political group MoveOn.org:

MoveOn itself was founded well before the war, or even Bush’s presidency, as an effort during Bill Clinton’s impeachment to push Congress to censure the president and “move on.” Their petition also went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks. After that, the group used its list to raise money for progressive Democrats. By the time Bush was threatening war, MoveOn had become a well-oiled machine.

So virus and viral have gone from poisonous slime to internet meme in just six centuries.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, third edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, s.v. weis-. wiro-.

Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum) (before 13998), vol. 1 of 3. John Trevisa, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, Book 5, Chap. 48, 1.261.

Boyd, Andrew. “How a Twenty-Year-Old Revolutionized the Internet.” In Adrienne Maree Brown and William Upski Wimsatt. How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004, 167–72 at 168

Brunner, John. The Shockwave Rider. New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 176. Archive.org.

Carrigan, Tim. “New Apples Tempt Business.” PC User, 27 September 1989. Quoted at Wordspy.com.

Davis, Connie. “Murray Ridge Road Once Swamped with Forests.” Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), 13 September 1988, A-11/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Etymological Dictionary of Latin Online, 2010, s.v. vir, virus. Brill: Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online.

von Fleischhacker, Robert, ed. Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirugie.” Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gerrold, David. When Harlie Was One. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Archive.org.

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Photo credit: Cynthia Goldsmith, 2005. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.