Monkeypox

In my quest to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I have polled five monkeys to see if they regarded the term monkeypox as derogatory. All five monkeys, who, I should mention in the interest of verisimilitude, were not monkeys at all but rather three relatives, a dog, and a Boston Red Sox fan—monkeys are in short supply here in our happy little burg so I had to work with what I had—declared that the term was not derogatory, although the Boston Red Sox fan said he could not be sure, which is the sort of thing you would expect a Boston Red Sox fan to say, given their general lack of intelligence. The dog was ambivalent about the whole thing as well; there is a dogpox and most adult male dogs have had it at one time or another, but the malady is not related to monkeypox in any way and the dog believed that if he didn’t have to worry about monkeypox then he wasn’t going to worry about it. All the participants in the survey, however, agreed that bacon was the greatest thing since boar in a can. 

So, the monkeys are not complaining about the word monkeypox or any other variation of the variola virus. Given the lack of interest in the disease and its terminology in the monkey community, why are people complaining about the disease's name? Apparently, humans can spread monkeypox as well and usually do so at gay raves in Europe, which leads unavoidably to the question, which of the three do we avoid now? Discriminating against gays is illegal, discriminating against raves is boring, discriminating against Europe means that we have to drink American beer all the time. Perhaps the best solution is the one proposed by a friend of mine just as a wedding party crashed into our favorite watering hole: find out who is humping the monkeys and tell them to stop doing it. An admirable solution to the problem, I thought, but this solution does not come with a billion-dollar price tag and therefore is unlikely to generate much support from the pharmaceutical industry.