I've been catching up on the news. Seems Microsoft went open source. I'm at once amused and sad. Regardless of how I feel personally, the outcome likely won't be good. MS doesn't exactly have a shining record when it comes to security or releasing patches for holes. Now that the ne'er do-wells can see part of the source to windows (albeit an older version), you can bet that they will be pawing through it looking for exploits at maximum speed. I'm betting that we can expect a bunch of Windows security flaws announced in the coming weeks and months.

So it seems that a refresher on the nature of the computer virus is probably warranted. And given the size of the huge gaping hole that recently opened, there'll likely be more than one virus floating around. Which brings us to everyone's favorite topic: the plural form of the word 'virus'.

I came across a Straight Dope article about plurals for latin nouns, and it has some good information. More than I ever wanted to know, as a matter of fact. One part in particular applies here:

There is one more common English -us word borrowed from Latin that doesn't follow any of the rules above: virus. To the Romans a virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance, anything from snake venom to body odor. Ancient grammarians couldn't agree whether the word was a third-declension noun, a fourth-declension noun or in a class by itself, but the one thing they could agree on was that it didn't have a plural form. Ever. To the Romans, it was a mass noun, not a count noun. That hasn't stopped English writers from inventing pseudo-Latin plural forms to cover the modern countable senses of the word. Viri is formed on the false assumption that virus is a second-declension noun. (Viri in fact is the plural of Latin vir, "man".) Virii is an even worse mistake. Only Latin nouns that end in -ius form the plural with -ii. There are no really common English plurals in -ii other than radii. That hasn't stopped people from trying out such atrocious forms as virii and penii. Virii would be the plural of virius, if such a word existed in Latin. Other suggested plurals include virora, vira, virua, and vire. For more on the debate, see http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html. The one inescapable fact is that in classical Latin, there was no plural of the word. In English, the only correct plural is viruses.

And that, I think, is just about enough on the topic of viruses for the foreseeable future.