WILTYIMS #205: Thank you, sir, may I have another?!

Yesterday was another marathon exam session (hence my silence earlier in the week (actually, my posts are almost always silent (wait! I found an exception!))). We had exams from 9 to 5 with an hour lunch spent cramming for the tests we hadn't yet taken. Livin' life to the fullest right here.

Anyways we did, in fact, have class today because reasonable recovery time is for losers, apparently. We started our final chunk of microbiology with lectures on fungi today to be followed by an introduction to viruses tomorrow (or mycology and virology, respectively). To be honest, I don't think my brain had fully reset yet before lecture today and I retained absolutely nothing from sitting in class. But for the sake of you, my determined reader, I dug back through the lecture slides^* and found a thing:

TIL: Ringworm is a complete misnomer. Unlike roundworms, pinworms, and hookworms, which are all horribly gross macroscopic worms that can live, grow and breed inside people^☨, ringworms are not actually worms. Ringworm is the colloquial term for a large group of cutaneous (skin) infections caused by fungi. Amusingly though, the colloquial term has its origin in the actual medical name for the disease.

The different types of ringworm are classified by the Latin word tinea, followed by the Latin term for the body part they infect. So athlete's foot, which is a type of ringworm is called tinea pedis, which literally means "foot worm" even though there is no worm involved.

* Dug all the way to slide number 3
☨ Seriously, wear shoes or larvae will puncture your bare feet, swim to your lungs, crawl out of your trachea, to be swallowed into your intestines and grow into worms that feed and grow while releasing eggs in your poo. Yay parasites!