Granted, monkeypox is not a great name for a disease that spreads between humans, and nothing good can come of potentially racist associations or implications of bestiality. But the WHO’s “Best Practices,” if deployed across the board, would exclude many—maybe most—of the medical terms in use today. Taken in broader perspective, monkeypox isn’t even unusually off-base. Chickenpox has little to do with chickens, for instance, and, unlike monkeypox, it’s not a poxvirus but a herpesvirus. Maybe in a more perfect world, we’d refer to chickenpox as “chicken herpes”; but then again, the herpesviruses—named for the creeping spread of lesions they may produce—are already stigmatizing given their association with sexually transmitted infections. Nearly all of us contract a herpesvirus during our lives, via nonsexual spread. Just the same, I remember telling one patient that he had a disseminated herpesvirus infection only to watch him jump to the erroneous conclusion that his wife must have committed adultery.

Even though monkeypox is being used to harass people right now, bad actors who truly wish to deepen victims’ shame will always find a way to do so. Earlier this month, two gay men in Washington, D.C., are alleged to have been berated, then beaten, by teenagers who included monkeypox among a string of homophobic slurs. If that particular word had been unavailable, I’ll bet the others would have sufficed. Tone of voice and body language can, by themselves, turn a good word bad; and there’s little reason to think that any term for a disease, no matter how generic it might seem, cannot be wielded for ill purposes. “The name per se is not a major issue,” Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said last month. “It’s the weaponization of these names. It’s the use of these names in the pejorative.” Indeed, HIV is no longer called “gay-related immune deficiency,” but gay men are still frequently ostracized over the condition. Connotation outlives denotation. Even COVID-19—a disease name that was designed from the very start to be as inoffensive as possible—can easily be turned into a slur. “Covidians” and “Covidiots” abound.