Dot Wordsworth

Norovirus

issue 01 December 2012

‘I wandered home ’tween twelve and one,’ sang my husband, waving his head from side to side in the fond belief that it made him look more like Olivia Newton-John, ‘I cried, “My God, what have I done?” ’

I was feeling a little queasy to start with, and this did not help. The occasion, if not excuse, for my husband’s rendition of Banks of the Ohio was my having succumbed to a member of the Norovirus genus. It takes its name from Norwalk (pop. 17,012) in Ohio.

Norwalk, Ohio, is named after Norwalk, Connecticut, which the British set on fire in 1779. The householders were compensated with land south of Lake Erie, where the village, later city, of Norwalk, Ohio, grew up. Thus an Ohio city in a county named after the Huron (Wyandot) people, who spoke an Iroquoian language, bears a name from an eastern Algonquian language.

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