STRETCHING TETANUS

Tetanus is a type of infection that's most distinguishable by the muscular spasm symptoms. Turns out the etymology has a lot to do with that! The word was borrowed in the late fourteenth century from Latin, and even further back hails from Ancient Greek tetanos​, which meant "muscular spasm" (obviously the connection is because of the effect tetanus has) but earlier on it also carried the definition of "a stretching" (not too much of a stretch, heh). That comes from the verb teinein, meaning "to stretch", and, through Proto-Hellenic, we can finally derive this from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction ten, same meaning. Teinein is also present in "tone" and "hypotenuse" (we'll cover tone​ in a future post; hypotenuse is already done), and usage of the word tetanus in literature over time has been decreasing since 1924