Sobre El Origen de Uy El Lenguaje y La Literatura de Las Enfermedades Animales

On the Origin of “Oops!
”: The Language
and Literature of Animal Disease
Raymond Malewitz
In Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla

Wald writes that epidemics:
compe[l] attention—for scientists and the lay public alike—not only
because of the devastation [they] can cause but also because the cir-
culation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The in-
teractions that make us sick also constitute us as a community.1
Along similar lines in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari describe viral outbreaks as rhizomatic models for various kinds of non-
hierarchical communities. In their explanation of the intricate relationship
between deterritorialization (the detachment of a sign from a given con-
text) and reterritorialization (the repurposing of that sign in a new con-
text), they write that “under certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ
cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover,
it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not
without bringing with it ‘genetic information’ from the first host.”2
The pathogen to which they refer is an oncogenic ribonucleic acid (RNA)
virus or type C virus, first discovered by Raoul Benveniste and George To-
daro at the National Cancer Institute in 1974. A peculiar feature of this sort
I would like to thank the editors of Critical Inquiry for their helpful suggestions for this
essay. My research has been supported by Oregon State University’s Center for the Humani-
ties and the Special Collections and Archives Research Center.
1. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham,
N.C., 2008), p. 2.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, vol. 2 of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 10; hereafter
abbreviated TP.
Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019)

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Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Downloaded from www.journals.uchicago.edu by Nottingham Trent University on 07/17/19. For personal use only.
840 Raymond Malewitz / On the Origin of “Oops!”
of virus is its ability to pass genetic information between species—even if
those species are quite distinct from one another (in Benveniste and
Todaro’s case, domestic cats and baboons). As the New York Times excitedly
reported, this model of gene transfer troubles what Deleuze and Guattari call
an arboreal model of evolutionary development:
The traditional view of evolution, dating from the works of Charles
Darwin, is that it comes about through a succession of small
changes, gradually improving the ability of the species to survive.
The fossil record, however, seems to show remarkably abrupt leaps
from one species to the next, with no record of gradual transition.3
In other words, a gene or genetic sequence from a virus in one host is de-
territorialized, “tak[ing] flight, mov[ing] into the cells of an entirely dif-
ferent species,” but in so doing brings with it reterritorializing genetic in-
formation from its previous host (TP, p. 10). For Deleuze and Guattari,
this elaborate give and take creates a rhizome:
operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one
already differentiated line to another. . . . We form a rhizome with
our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with
other animals. . . .We evolve and die more from our polymorphous
and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that
have their own line of descent. [TP, pp. 10–11]
This representation of human/nonhuman genetic networks dovetails
with Wald’s model of human engagement with community; viruses—like
language or other sign systems—compel us to enter into rhizomes with
other communities in the process of coevolution. Departing from Wald’s
focus, however, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that viral outbreaks create
rhizomatic communities not only between people but also between spe-
cies. By calling attention to the type C virus, Deleuze and Guattari imply
that we might not only genetically instantiate but also begin to consciously
imagine communities beyond as well as inclusive of the human.4
3. Walter Sullivan, “Genetic Research Detects Transfers,” New York Times, 1 Nov. 1982,
www.nytimes.com/1982/11/01/us/genetic-research-detects-transfers.html
4. Though she vehemently disagrees with Deleuze and Guattari’s model of becoming-
animal—characterizing it as misogynist and ageist—Donna Haraway reaches similar conclu-
sions regarding viral community building. Describing an interaction with her dog, she writes
R a y m o n d M a l e w i t z is associate professor of English and Graduate Direc-

tor at Oregon State University. He is the author of The Practice of Misuse: Rug-
ged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture (2014).

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2019 841
Unfortunately, this possibility does not present itself in most discus-
sions of animal disease. In contrast to the enduring cultural hypervisibility
of human pathogens that Wald documents in her study, animal diseases—
if they are noted at all—tend to move quickly to the periphery of represen-
tation, lying dormant in cultural germ lines for years until extreme events
reactivate them. Consider the avian bird flu. In 1968, scientists published a
brief letter in Nature revealing that they had isolated the influenza A virus
from migratory waterfowl.5 Subsequent scientific reports suggested that
the flu was a relatively common and fairly innocuous feature of a bird’s
life—particularly during seasonal migrations in which bird populations
concentrated on certain lakes and rivers. In the late fall of 1983, this flu
was made temporarily visible when a stronger form of the virus emerged
in Pennsylvania poultry farms, leading to the deaths of up to 10 percent
of birds per day. To try to contain the pathogen, farms in the affected re-
gion killed millions of turkeys and chickens in the final two months of
the year, but the virus soon spread to neighboring states. The failure of
the quarantine led fourteen countries including Canada, West Germany,
and the Soviet Union to ban the importation of chickens from affected re-
gions in early 1984. With the disease spreading quickly throughout the
northeast, the US Department of Agriculture took drastic action, calling
for the immediate destruction of any chicken and turkey populations found
to be infected with either the high-pathogenic or low-pathogenic forms of
the virus. In November of the same year, after the extermination of seven-
teen million turkeys and chickens, the USDA finally lifted restrictions
on poultry transportation from the affected states, after which the lower-
pathogenic form of the virus quietly went about its continued business.6
As the 1984 poultry outbreak suggests, diseased animals become cul-
turally legible only if their communities impinge on human communi-
ties—either economically or, more dramatically, when viruses cross over
I’m sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. Some molecular record of
our touch in the codes of living will surely leave traces in the world, no matter that
we are each reproductively silenced females. . . . Her red merle Australian shepherd’s
quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager im-
mune system receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her mes-
sages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and
binding outside to inside? (Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet [Minneapolis,
2008], p. 16).
As in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Haraway here uses a microbiological relationship between
different species’ cells to establish a new model for the representation of kinship relations.
5. See B. C. Easterday et al., “Evidence of Infection with Influenza Viruses in Migratory
Waterfowl” Nature, 4 Aug. 1968, pp. 523–4.
6. See “Avian Flu Quarantine Lifted,” Washington Post, 5 Oct. 1984, p. A19.

between animal and human populations. Such events are often not, as in
Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the type C virus, catalysts for
some alternative form of imagined community but rather, as their refer-
ence to rhizomatic flus suggests, biopolitical emergencies organized around
the prevention of human death on an immense scale. In 1996, an un-
usual, highly pathogenic form of the same virus (H5N1) was discovered
in the goose population in the Guangdong region of China. The virus
soon spread to poultry populations, and a year later the virus infected
eighteen Hong Kong residents, six of whom died from the disease. To
contain this zoonotic (that is, transspecies) form of the virus, over four
hundred million birds across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa were
culled. It is, of course, this dangerous virus that is invoked whenever pop-
ular culture addresses bird flu, and this invocation—far from forging
transspecies communities in a Benthamite model of shared suffering—
positions birds as Typhoid Marys of the animal kingdom: dangerous vec-
tors for rather than victims of (or cohabitants with) contagious patho-
gens.7 In Contagion (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2011), for example, when
American scientists search for the origin of a killer virus sweeping across
the globe, a representative of Homeland Security asks his chief virologist
if “there is any way someone could weaponize the bird flu?” The virolo-
gist, played by Laurence Fishburne, coolly replies: “Someone doesn’t have
to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.”8
Perhaps to combat this line of thinking, scientists now distinguish be-
tween two kinds of avian flus: H5N1 and Low Pathogenicity Avian Influ-
enza Viruses (LPAIVs), which are a common presence in aquatic bird
populations.9 Given the dominant outbreak narrative of zoonotic disease
transmission, however, this distinction hardly matters in practice. Of a
set of 910 newspaper articles on avian flus that I surveyed from the last four
decades, only six acknowledged the division between high-pathogenic and
low-pathogenic strains. One of those six articles reported that after an out-
break of avian flu on two poultry farms in 2009, sixty thousand turkeys and
twelve thousand breeder birds were euthanized. The events’ resemblance
to the indiscriminate killing of sickened poultry in 1984 was apparent when
7. Jeremy Bentham famously argues that the ethical treatment of animals can only pro-
ceed when a shared capacity for suffering replaces speech or reason as the foundation of a
given community’s actions; see Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation (London, 1823), p. 311.
8. Contagion, dir. Steven Soderbergh (2011).
9. See Bethany Hoye et al., “Reconstructing an Annual Cycle of Interaction: Natural Infec-
tion and Antibody Dynamics to Avian Influenza Along a Migratory Flyway,” Oikos, 120
(Oct. 2010): 748–55.

scientific testing determined that the virus infecting the exterminated birds
was actually of the low-pathogenicity variety.10
When read against Wald’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s models of imag-
ined community, this brief history illustrates the clear costs of how we
understand the animal world that surrounds us and, strictly speaking, is
us. Because of our shared genetic heritage, humans and other animals
are equally subject to microbial infection, and the diseases that affect non-
human communities have clear analogs in and often cross over into the
human world. But these commonalities rarely precipitate the same ques-
tions regarding community that are asked in the context of human path-
ogens. Indeed, anthropocentric biopolitical policies working in tandem
with dominant cultural narratives tend to establish a clear binary frame-
work for the management of animal disease that reifies rather than com-
plicates the human/nonhuman divide. The only human analog to this
cleaving process is Giorgio Agamben’s famous distinction between zoē
(bare life) and bios (a life inflected with and supported by the political
life of a community).11 Read within this model, animal diseases are either
a benign marker of absolute species difference, in which case they are of
no particular interest to humans, or they are an existential threat to hu-
manity, in which case animals occupy the position of bare life in human
communities. Like Agamben’s homo sacer, “they may be killed and yet
not sacrificed.”12
This dominant framework is not just a destructive and often inaccu-
rate model for animal disease. Through its dominance, the zoonotic out-
break narrative has also obscured other stories that might be—and in-
deed have been—told about animal pathogens. As the great naturalist
Aldo Leopold laments:
It is a pity that the narratives of scientific exploration in [the field
of animal diseases]—as fantastic a romance as any Arabian Nights—
10. See “Quarantine Lifted on Poultry Farms,” The Globe and Mail, 20 Mar. 2009, www
.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/quarantine-lifted-on-poultry-farms/article
1155641/
11. Agamben begins his famous work by tracing the Greek origins of two terms for life:
“zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men,
or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a
group” (Giorgio Agamben, “Introduction,” Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, Calif., 1998], p. 1). This distinction is reproduced in epidemi-
ological vocabulary: epidemic (from the Greek epi-demos, or upon the people) is restricted to
human disease, while epizootic (from the Greek epi-zoion, or upon the animal) is a catch-all
term for widespread disease among any other animal populations.
12. Ibid., p. 10.

should either be masked by such technical verbiage as to mean
nothing to the thinking layman or translated for the popular press
in such kindergarten terms as to be no longer true. These explora-
tions have divulged a fabric of relationships in the biotic community
of great import not alone to conservation, but to sociology and
philosophy as well.13
This essay takes up Leopold’s proto-Deleuzian claim in the hopes that
we might soon add literature and language studies to his categories. Fol-
lowing Leopold, I argue that animal diseases are not simply biological
facts but function as what Bruno Latour would call “matters of concern,”
things that gather together a remarkable number of actors far beyond
those common to veterinary science. In the case of avian flu history, these
actors include farmers, domestic and wild birds, bureaucratic organiza-
tions, journalists, and filmmakers or—in the case of the type C virus—
baboons, cats, cancer scientists, evolutionary biologists, journalists, and
French philosophers.14 In keeping with this model, I frame my subsequent
argument around the strange history of one animal epidemic—a history
that demonstrates how quickly a matter of veterinary fact can become
enmeshed in complex human networks of concern. By assembling the ac-
tors of this history into critical outbreak counternarratives, we gain a better
understanding of how animal diseases have always been entangled with
our language, our habits of thought, and our community infrastructure.
In other words, by considering the imaginative alongside the material,
we become aware of how we have always formed cultural as well as genetic
rhizomes with the nonhuman species around us through the pathogens
that beset them. Though my analysis is limited to this case study, I hope
it will provide a model for how future cultural investigations of animal dis-
ease might proceed.
An Etiological Etymology of Oops

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sheepish exclamation
“Oops,” an expression of “apology, dismay, or surprise, esp. after an obvi-
ous but usually minor mistake,” was first used in a humorous horse-racing
column entitled “Collyer’s Comment on the Sport of Kings” in the Wash-
ington Post on 21 November 1921. The dictionary editors posit that the word
may be a shortened version of “up-a-daisy” and later “upsidaisy,” which
adults since at least the eighteenth century have cooed when propelling
13. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York, 1933), p. 324.

14. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Mat-
ters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 231.

FIGURE 1. From “Horse Laughs at the Loco Weed War,” Virginia

Enterprise, 10 Dec. 1909.
small children into the air.15 I would like to suggest an alternative to this
etymology by way of a cartoon printed alongside another purportedly hu-
morous article on 10 December 1909 in The Virginia Enterprise, a weekly
newspaper in northeastern Minnesota. Republished by at least six other
regional newspapers, the article describes the newly formed United States
Bureau of Plant Industry’s attempt to eradicate locoweeds, a set of plants
(Oxytropis and Astragalus) indigenous to the American west that produce a
toxin harmful to livestock.16 Upon ingestion, the article notes, the weed
“robs an animal of its muscular coordination, causing it to do all sorts
of fancy antics, and finally results in the animal starving itself to death.”17
Placed at the top of the article is a sketch of a “plumb locoed” horse shout-
ing “Whee!–Oop” (fig. 1).
Though the cartoon horse’s laughter may in some oblique way relate to
the upsidaisy game, its spelling and context suggests a closer relationship to
two neologisms in circulation in the United States at the time—ooperzoo-
tics and oopazooty—which, according to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, refer
to “a fit of [human] eccentricity, craziness.”18 The terms are phonological
variants of the veterinary terms epizooty, a widespread disease affecting ani-
mals, and epizootic, an adjective that describes such a disease. Both terms
were popularized by the Great Epizootic of 1872, an equine flu that pro-
duced high fevers, poor appetite, nasal congestion, extreme lethargy, and a
15. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “oops.”

16. The other newspapers were The North Platte Semi-Weekly Tribune, 14 Dec. 1909, p. 6,
The Willmar Tribune, 15 Dec. 1909, p. 6, The Spanish Fork Press, 16 Dec. 1909, p. 2, The
Muldrow Press, 17 Dec. 1909, p. 5, The Jackson Herald, 30 Dec. 1909, p. 3, and The Alamogordo
News, 20 Jan. 1910, p. 2.
17. “Horse Laughs at the Loco Weed War,” The Virginia Enterprise, 10 Dec. 1909, p. 8.
18. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, s.v. “oopizootics.”

characteristically violent dry cough in affected animals. Originating in To-
ronto in the early fall of 1872, this most widespread and destructive epizooty
in recorded history sickened nearly all North American horses for a pe-
riod of weeks as it quickly travelled south through major urban centers such
as New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond and west along the railroad lines
through St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver before reaching Pacific Coast
cities in March 1873.19
The disease followed a clear path from city to city in large part because
during this period, urban centers depended upon horsepower for the ma-
jority of their transportation needs. Though the late nineteenth century is
often understood as the era of steam power, all North American cities re-
lied upon horses for the intracity transportation of people (through omni-
buses, carriages, and horse-drawn streetcars) and freight (through team-
pulled drays). Within the northeast, horse populations often exceeded
six hundred per square mile, making transmission of the virus inevitable.
The need for continuous city transit options forced many sick horses into
service, resulting in much higher equine mortality rates in urban centers
than in rural communities, where horses were less concentrated and often
better provisioned. Only when horses began dying at an alarming rate did
their urban owners suspend their work, leading to the paralysis of com-
merce in the major North American cities for a period of days or weeks.
This paralysis, in turn, brought renewed attention to the important
roles that horses played within seemingly anthropocentric communities.
As the New York Times reported on 1 November 1872:
What will be the effect of even a temporary withdrawal of the
horsepower from the nation, is a serious question to contemplate.
Coal cannot be hauled from the mines to run locomotives, farmers
cannot market their produce, boats cannot reach their destination
on the canals, and bills drawn against Western shipments will be
protested. Panic will seize the community and aside from the many
millions to be lost in the value of horses, the most disastrous unset-
tling of values is more than probable. 20
19. This epizootic closely followed a cattle plague that devastated livestock in the Ameri-
can West in 1868. The American public would thus have had multiple opportunities to hear
the term epizootic used in a short span of time. See, for example, “The Cattle Plague,” The
Scientific American, 21 Oct. 1865, www.scientificamerican.com/index.cfm/_api/render/file
/?method=inline&fileID=A8254B65-31BC-4D05-9A4534987793A3AC
20. “The Horse Epidemic,” New York Times, 1 Nov. 1872, www.nytimes.com/1872/11/01
/archives/the-horse-epidemic.html

Such accounts remind us that transportation infrastructure always plays
an important role in the construction of social networks, but this role is
often obscured by our habit of separating infrastructural artifacts from
the social relationships they enter into with humans. To render this in-
frastructure visible, Latour argues, often requires:
accidents, breakdowns, and strikes: all of a sudden, completely silent
intermediaries become full-blown mediators; even objects, which a
minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of
human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving hu-
mans with heavy equipment.21
The aftereffects of the Great Epizootic of 1872 clearly correspond to
this infrastructural model, with crowds of humans thrust into the role
of propellant forces and silent animal “intermediaries” speaking and be-
ing spoken about as “full-blown mediators.” As Jeffrey Flanagan observes:
Pedestrians in a typical nineteenth-century American city had to be
acutely aware of their surroundings. On top of maneuvering around
street vendors, shoppers, a variety of workers, and each other, they
also had to dodge, duck, and otherwise avoid the multitude of
drays, carts, wagons, carriages, and streetcars that further crowded
the streets. On November 13, 1872, however, the people of Rich-
mond had clear streets to walk upon, as the horses that pulled these
vehicles were curiously absent, prompting some to remark that the
city looked like “Richmond in by-gone days.” Others witnessed
things on this day that would not fit the profile of either by-gone or
contemporary images of Richmond. On Fourteenth Street, onlook-
ers marveled at a rare sight as wagons owned by the Storrs & Co.
general store set out with teams of oxen rather than horses. Rarer
still was the wagon that set out with a team of bulls. Those on
Twelfth Street beheld perhaps the rarest sight of all, however, as
they watched a team not of animals but of men struggle to push
and pull a wagon full of flour to its destination.22
Unsurprisingly, the strange sights of humans thrust into the position of
animals hauling coal or flour led to a number of humorous poems and
cartoon images published in papers and magazines that played upon
21. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York,
2005), p. 81.
22. Jeffrey Flanagan, “On the Backs of Horses: The Great Epizootic of 1872” (master’s the-
sis, William and Mary University, 2011), p. 2.

these role reversals, including an anthropomorphized sickened horse
soaking its hooves (fig. 2), another image from the magazine showing
men dragging carts through New York City streets (fig. 3), and an auda-
cious poem (excerpted below) entitled “Hors De Combat” first published
in a Boston newspaper before spreading (like the virus) to southern and
western US newspapers:
Upon my sole I’ve walked so much

Since horses have been hoarse
I feel like some pedestrian sport
In training on the course.
....
Then let us hope that horses may
Be freed from present woes,
And running on their feet again
Instead of at their nose.23
As the tone of these materials suggests, the North American press
viewed the Great Epizootic as both an infrastructural disaster and a comic
reversal of the typical rules of human-animal relationships. Most notably,
the responses’ ample use of puns—horse/hoarse/hors, sole/soul, and so
on—builds what Mikhail Bakhtin, following François Rabelais, calls gram-
matica jocosa (playful language) into representations of the horse disease.
As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain, Bakhtin borrows the phrase
from Rabelais to denote linguistic moments in which “grammatical order
is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying
counter-meaning.”24 Related to the venerable Russian critic’s model of the
carnival as a “suspension of all hierarchical precedence,” grammatica jo-
cosa is a fitting form to describe the events of the Great Epizootic, in which
the worlds of humans and horses suddenly crossed into one another.25
Not only did it quickly become acceptable to joke in this manner, so
taken were people with the strange word epizootic that they quickly began
23. The title puns on the French phrase for outside of combat, that is, a soldier who can
no longer carry on a fight. Published first in the Boston Commercial Bulletin, the poem was
reprinted in Harrisburg Telegraph, 13 Nov. 1872, p. 1, Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, 20 Nov. 1872,
p. 1, Daily Phoenix, 21 Nov. 1872, p. 3, Northern Ohio Journal, 23 Nov. 1872, p. 1, Bloomington
Pantagraph, 29 Nov. 1872, p. 1, The Wyandott Herald, 28 Nov. 1872, p. 1, Atchison Daily Cham-
pion, 29 Dec. 1872, p. 2, and The Nebraska Advertiser, 9 Jan. 1873, p. 1.
24. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1986), pp. 10–11.
25. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind.,
2009), p. 10.

FIGURE 2. “A Cheval-rous Patient,” Harper’s Weekly, 16 Nov. 1872, p. 904.
to apply it to human diseases. A San Francisco Rural Press correspondent,

for example, reported that “the epizooty is prevailing pretty generally
throughout the State, and the word epizooty is so common that when
two neighbors meet it is, ‘How are your horses?’ or ‘How is the epizooty?’
and even the little ones are applying the term epizooty to everything that
they hear cough.”26
26. “Strange Horse Disease,” The Country Gentleman’s Magazine: A Book for the Country
House (London, 1873), p. 156.

FIGURE 3. “The Horse Plague—Sketches about Town During the Epidemic,” Harper’s
Weekly, 16 Nov. 1872, p. 900.
When read in this light, the Oxford English Dictionary’s Washington Post
entry for oops makes much more sense as a historical allusion to diseased
and erratically behaving horses (and, perhaps, the accompanying reorga-
nization of social relationships that such diseases force upon humans) than
as an allusion to a children’s game. Indeed, the larger context of that entry
clinches the relationship between accidental behaviors and epizootic dis-
eases. Bert Collyer peppered his weekly column on horse racing for the Wash-
ington Post with equine puns. The aforementioned 21 November column,
for example, begins with his best bet at the Pimlico Race Course in Balti-
more, Maryland:
St. Henry.
Go to it boys. It comes to muh direct from the fodder trough
that this smart youngster will be on the front end of the procession
all the way today. Seems to have been dropped into a soft spot, and
with anything like decent racing luck, will ring the bell.27
27. Bert E. Collyer, “Collyer’s Comment on the Sport of Kings,” Washington Post, 1 Nov.
1921, p. 21.

At the end of the article, Collyer forecasts the final race, which includes
his three picks to place: My Dear, Slippery Elm, and Light Rose. It is here
that the term oops debuts in a major eastern newspaper:
Oops, muh dear, it’s in the last where the dirty work takes place.
Today is the day for Slippery Elm and nothing but a world of tuff
racing luck is going to prevent him from looking the judge in the
eye. Light Rose can be second, with My Dear saving the “peep”
money.28
Dovetailing the Virginia Enterprise story, in this formative context, oops
seems to serve as an appositive for the horse named My Dear, who claims
the final “‘peep’” prize money with a third-place finish but cannot com-
pete with the two faster horses—presumably because it has taken ill. Given
the long-standing association between horses and epizootics (or ooper-
zootics) within horse communities of the time period, it is therefore rea-
sonable to assume that oops entered the English language by way of this
animal disease before migrating to its current usage as a marker of human
foibles.
The Cultural Legacy of the Great Epizootic

Two other references in the OED entry for oops, Dorothy Parker’s
short story “Lady with a Lamp” (1939) and Ralph Manheim’s translation
of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment
Plan, 1966), use the term in a manner that begins to cross over from its
initial association with animal sickness to its modern association with hu-
man folly. Narrated as one-half of a long dialogue between a monstrous
unnamed woman and her “oldest friend” Mona, whose responses to the
narrator are never revealed, Parker’s story opens with the narrator enter-
ing Mona’s house, ostensibly to give her comfort for a mysterious illness
but in fact to determine if her condition is the result of an abortion after
an ill-fated relationship with a man who has left her.29 The narrator pep-
pers the story with animal imagery designed to simultaneously comfort
and provoke Mona. At first the narrator chides her friend for keeping
the illness secret, but when she nears Mona, she pretends to be taken aback
by her actual condition, telling her “And now to see you lying there—well,
I feel like a complete dog” (“LL,” p. 246). After likening Mona to a “little
wounded animal,” she then insists that Mona “tell [her] all about it,” and
28. Ibid.
29. Dorothy Parker, “Lady with the Lamp,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York,
1973), p. 246; hereafter abbreviated “LL.”

to better hear the story, she pulls a chair to Mona’s bed and squeals “oops”
when the movement “joggle[s] the bed” (“LL,” pp. 247, 248). Later, when
Mona attempts to pass it off as a cold, the narrator asks her “Don’t you
want my handkerchief, lamb?” which provokes Mona’s complete collapse
into tears (“LL,” p. 248).
A similar breakdown takes place in the middle of Manheim’s transla-
tion of Death on the Installment Plan, when the narrator Ferdinand recalls
a rocky trip across the English Channel with his parents when he was a
child. As he walks around the deck, he watches his mother “vomit across
the deck and down into third class.”30 She is the first of many:
Some of the others began straining their guts over the side . . . In
the rolling and pitching, people were throwing up any old place,
without formality . . . There was only one toilet . . . in one corner of
the deck . . . It was already occupied by four vomiters in a state of
collapse, wedged in tight . . . The sea was getting steadily rougher . . .
At every rising wave oops . . . In the trough a dozen oopses, more
copious, more compact. [DIP, p. 123]31
In a passage simultaneously grotesque and carnivalesque, what follows is
an extended catalogue of the content and manner of the collective regur-
gitations of the people on board: the captain and first and second class
passengers vomit “whole meals” on the family and fellow third-class pas-
sengers on the deck below; Ferdinand “embrace[s]” a fellow passenger
and they vomit passionately on one another; a sick dog emerges on deck
and “shits on [another passenger’s] skirts” before rolling over and “show
[ing] us his belly,” literalizing the idiomatic expression “sick as a dog”
and amplifying the farrago (DIP, p. 124).32
30. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York, 1971), p. 123; hereafter abbreviated DIP.
31. Manheim translated Céline’s “rendu,” meaning to vomit or to turn something in, as
oops: “A chaque houle, à la remontée, un bon rendu . . . A la descente au moins douze bien
plus opulents, plus compacts” (Céline, Mort á crédit [Paris, 1952], p. 128).
32. Predating germ theories of illness, the British phrase “sick as a dog” and its variants
“sick as a cat” and “sick as a horse” are associated with vomiting due to disgust, seasickness,
and alcohol overindulgence, as well as illness. Indeed, Céline’s vomiting scene geographically
and formally echoes a passage from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman, in which the eponymous hero travels the same English Channel as
Céline’s characters and experiences the same nausea. After the captain tells him the voyage
will be over before he has time to be sick, he thinks:
What a cursed liar! For I am as sick as a horse, quoth I, already.—What a brain!—
upside down!—hey-day!—the cells are broke loose one into another, and the blood,
and the lymph, and the nervous juices, with the fix’d and volatile salts, are all jumbled
into one mass!—good G–! every thing turns round in it like a thousand whirlpools.—

In both narratives, the proximity of the word oops to instability, sick-
ness, and animality (likening Mona to a “wounded animal,” in Parker’s
story, and eliding sick humans and sick animals, in Céline’s novel) rein-
forces the etymological link between the term and the unstable, sickly
horses that shut down North America near the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury.33 If, as the OED suggests, oops is an expression of “apology, dismay,
or surprise, esp. after an obvious but usually minor mistake,” these exam-
ples enable us to modify the definition slightly to emphasize the manner
by which the mistake seems to emanate not from the mind but from the
troublesome, animalized body. When we cannot steel our stomachs or
our bowels against the rise and fall of the seas, when our physical move-
ments accidentally reveal the ways we impinge upon the space of another,
or—in the case of Rick Perry’s famous gaffe during a 2011 Republican pri-
mary debate—when our minds shut down as we try to remember some
important talking point, we shrug our shoulders and say “oops.”
Deleuze and Guattari might characterize such moments under the cat-
egory of becoming-animal. In the enigmatic chapter “Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . ” from A Thousand Pla-
teaus, they argue that humans have the capacity to experience an animal-
ity that breaks down conventional modes of community filiation and sub-
jective identification. In place of such humanist activities, they propose
“becoming-animal” as filiation with “the pack”—the swarming “multiplicity”
that they define as animal community (TP, p. 240). Becoming-animal is
thus experienced as a momentary loss of self (“becoming-imperceptible”),
an “affect [that] is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the
I’d give a shilling to know if I shan’t write the clearer for it.—Sick! sick! sick! sick!
(Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [New York,
1950], pp. 497–8).
Like Céline’s ellipses, Sterne’s long dashes convey the suddenness and breakdown of order
that characterizes this poor adventure.
33. Many of Parker’s stories operate in similar territory. In “Horsie,” a woman named
Miss Wilmarth is hired as a nanny by the Cruger family, who viciously mock what they char-
acterize as her equine appearance and are unnerved at her presence within the house. As
Mr. Cruger tells his wife, “nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behav-
ing as if it were all right. You don’t catch horses going around looking like people, do you?”
(Parker, “Horsie,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 261). Likewise, in “Big Blonde,” the al-
coholic heroine, Hazel Morse, is drawn to images of weary, beaten horses “struggling and
slipping along the car-tracks, or standing at the curb, their heads dropped level with their
worn knees” or “struggle[ing] to get a footing” under the lashings of their driver (Parker,
“Big Blonde,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, pp. 201, 204). These situations parallel Parker’s
many ill-fated relationships with abusive men, suggesting that she was drawn the suffering of
animals as a way of addressing her own suffering. For numerous examples of Parker’s love of
animals, (including a time in which she kissed a cab horse in New York because he looked
tired): see Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York, 1988).

effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and
makes it reel” (TP, p. 240). Such an affect encodes events associated with
the Great Epizootic and the neologism it produced. Through the mediat-
ing figure of the horse flu, teams of men were imbued with the capacity of
teams of horses, with the effect being less an imitation of horses (as the
magazine cartoons framed it) than a temporary assemblage of horsepower.
As the same time, singular domestic horses with clearly assigned tasks be-
came, if only momentarily, a teeming, rhizomatic vector for the perpetu-
ation of disease.
Likewise, the collective oopses in the Manheim translation of Céline
mark out a temporary suspension of filial relationships that structures not
only Ferdinand’s family but also the various decks of the ships, enabling
a new “pack” to appear that brings Ferdinand into a strange kind of in-
timacy with—among other elements—an anonymous married woman
and a sickened dog. The characters on the ship join with the wave that
“beats down on the rail, smacks against the deck, rises, gushes, rolls back,
sweeps the steerage.” Ferdinand describes this multiplicity as a thing that
confounds differences between the spirit and the material, the human
and the animal, and the individual and the collective: “We swallow some
of [this wind and spray] . . . We spit it up again . . . At every plunge the
soul flies away . . . at every rise you recapture it in a wave of mucus and
stink” (DIP, p. 124). Likewise, in the Parker story the narrator structures
her visit to unlock Mona’s secret, but when she approaches Mona, her
overeager body betrays her and disrupts her interrogation. Read in this
way, the word oops might therefore be understood as an indirect linguis-
tic acknowledgement of the assembled character of our putatively singu-
lar selfhood, which has the capacity to do things other than what a con-
stituted, subjective self thinks it wishes for itself.
Needless to say, this experience of “becoming-animal” need not be
construed as a liberation from the self so much as a momentary collapse
of the self. After all, such activities encourage extreme responses from au-
thoritarian figures such as Ferdinand’s father and the vomiting woman’s
husband, who pull the pair apart and begin to fight each other in an at-
tempt to restore order. The association of this changed relationship to
community with animal disease thus clearly reinforces a hegemonic pre-
scription to interpret such transgressions as mistakes. Indeed, though
Wald notes that the word contagion means literally “to touch together,”
she argues that the subjects of paradigmatic outbreak narratives often are
not sick communities united by shared suffering but rather communities
that organize themselves around the containment of disease. As she goes
on to argue, responses to disease outbreaks are in many ways structured

by the disavowal of certain kinds of physical and ideological contact. “The
community to be protected,” she concludes, “is thereby configured in cul-
tural and political as well as biological terms: the nation as immunolog-
ical ecosystem.”34
This negative immunological coding is reflected in subsequent uses of
the term. In 1896, Harry Hunter, head of a British minstrel troupe called
“The Manhattan Minstrels,” published a song in his Mohawk Minstrels
Magazine entitled “I’ve Got the Ooperzootic.” Framed from the perspec-
tive of the husband of a “lady doctor,” the song lampoons the wife’s pre-
tentious use of Latinate phrases within her diagnoses. The song quickly
became a staple of Hunter’s most popular singer, Johnny Danvers, and
achieved some popularity in the United States. In the chorus, Danvers
sings:
Oh, I’ve got the Ooperzootic and I don’t know where I am
I’ve got the “Ooperzootic” in my “Parallelogram”
My heart is in a wobble and my head is in a whizz
For I’ve got the “Ooperzootic” and I don’t know where it is.
It may be in my finger, and it may be in my thumb
It may be in the corner of my “Pericardium.” 35
Michael Pickering argues that the song targets Dr. Elizabeth Garrett An-
derson (1836–1917), an active member of the suffragist movement in En-
gland and the first woman to occupy a position as physician and surgeon
in the country. As he writes, the song “did not name Anderson directly,
but given public knowledge of her singular career success, there was no
need to do so. Anderson struggled against intense male bigotry and chau-
vinism in following her chosen profession, and was forced to submit her
M.D. in Paris after refusal to allow her to do so in Britain.”36 When placed
within the context of the minstrel shows in which it was sung, the song also
clearly seems to traffic in a racist and sexist logic linking woman and Afri-
can Americans to confused animals who have forgotten to behave as they
should.
Author and early animal rights activist Royal Dixon adopts the same
racist and misogynist inflection of the term in his novel Signs Is Signs. At
the request of a white man named Henry Neill, a mammy figure named
Aunt Moriah recounts a story in which she is asked to help her friend Car-
oline dress a corpse. As she tells Neill:
34. Wald, Contagious, p. 53; and see p. 12.

35. Harry Hunter and Edmund Forman, “I’ve Got the Ooperzootic [1896],” monologues
.co.uk/musichall/Songs-I/Ive-Got-The-Ooperzootic.htm
36. Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (New York, 2017), p. 45.

“Po’ Calline! she was jest weepin’ and wailin’ and sayin’ how de po’
copse had siffered so long fo’ hit passed away, and how it had sich a
gift fo’ ailments of all kinds from epizudic to locomotia ataxia; and
how many orgins it had to have carved outin’ itself. Po’ thing! she
said it hastened its death by talking so much ‘bout its opirations—hit
was jest like other females in that respect.”37
Given his longstanding interests in animals and animal suffering, it is un-
surprising that he uses the term epizudics in his novel. At the same time,
he displaces this interest onto the obscure complaints of a woman, sug-
gesting that he had much more sympathy for sickened animals than sick-
ened black women.38
This is not to say that the term was not in circulation among southern
and African American communities. Zora Neale Hurston, for example,
adopts the term in her short story “Sweat” (1926). As black men in the
story gather at a country store to complain about the heat, one suggests
that “a watermelon is jes’ whut Ah needs tuh cure de eppizudicks.”39 But
the vast majority of the term’s usages were intended to pathologize cer-
tain behaviors—particularly in women. In Elmer Rice’s novel Imperial City
(1937), for example, after a wife rejects her husband’s sexual advances,
he asks her “So what’s wrong with you? You got the epizudic or some-
thing?”40 Along similar gendered lines, in Calder Willingham’s Rambling
Rose (1972), the eponymous nymphomaniac nanny of the 1940s narrative
is beset by a number of different medical conditions ranging from in-
fluenza to an ovarian cyst, which are characterized by her employer, the
narrator’s father, as “great epizootics” or “‘gaga epizootics.’”41 Anecdotal
37. Royal Dixon, Signs is Signs (Philadelphia, 1915), p. 147.

38. Indeed, in contrast to the fictional Caroline, Dixon insisted that animals had an al-
most preternatural ability to cure their own diseases:
The American Indians learned most of their cures from watching animals, especially
the cure of such diseases as fever, rheumatism, dysentery, and snake-bites. A rheu-
matic old wolf would bathe in the warm waters of a sulphur spring; a sick and fever-
ish deer would eat the fresh leaves of healing ferns, while a wounded hog or bear
would always seek a red-clay bath to heal the wounds. Sick dogs will invariably eat
certain weeds, and an unwell cat will seek healing mints and grasses (Royal Dixon,
The Human Side of Animals [New York, 1918], p. 125).
39. Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat,” in Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale
Hurston (Berkeley, 1985), p. 44.
40. Elmer Rice, Imperial City (New York, 1937), p. 203. In 1924, Rice collaborated with
Parker on a play and they carried out a brief affair. According to Parker, Rice was “without
question the worst fuck I ever had,” and she quickly broke it off, but their relationship may
have inspired both this scene and the equine vocabulary that both writers adopt (Marion
Meade, Dorothy Parker, p. 125).
41. Calder Willingham, Rambling Rose (New York, 1972), pp. 176, 206.

evidence from various online dictionaries of slang suggest that the term
persists in certain southeastern communities in the US.42
The cultural endurance of terms oops and epizootic highlights a strange
paradox at the center of the historical record that contributes to the dif-
ficulties of taking animal suffering seriously. Many of the aforementioned
stories anthropomorphize horse illness and zoomorphize human behav-
ior. At the same time, these interspecies crossovers rarely resulted in feel-
ings of empathy or a shared sense of community that might accompany
Deleuze and Guattari’s model of becoming-animal. The Harper’s Weekly
cartoon, for example, includes a caption beneath the title that seems to
call for some capacity to feel the animal’s pain: “Ungrateful man never
appreciated my faithful services until now. When I am convalescent, I
hope he will treat me with more consideration and kindness.”43 But this
sentiment is undercut by the punny title and ludicrously anthropomor-
phized image, which suggests that the statement should be read in a com-
parably ironic way. Put slightly differently, it is precisely by virtue of the
fact that horses were made partially human—in their bodies and in their
supposed thoughts—that they were rendered dismissible in the same way
that human foibles are dismissed with a simple “oops.”44 The glee with
which the Virginia Enterprise casts the awful effects of locoweed and the
often racist and misogynist sketches, songs, and poems that emerged as
responses to the Great Epizootic remind us that animal misery has often
been cast as a comedic or threatening event. The dismissal of such pain,
like the comedic dismissal of the aspirations of women and American mi-
norities, inoculates adopters of the term from any sense of community
responsibility that might accompany the anthropomorphizing that takes
place when animals express the same responses to disease or poison as
humans.
What then are we to do with the philological legacy of the Great Epi-
zootic? How might we use it to resist the seemingly inevitable conversion
of animal suffering into spasmodic comedy? To return to the terms of
Deleuze and Guattari, the Great Epizootic not only briefly infected our
42. See, for example, The Online Slang Dictionary (Sacramento, Calif.), s.v. “epizootics of
the blowhole,” and The Rice University Neologisms Database, s.v. “epizudics.” In Marisha
Pessl’s debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a girl at an elite private school in North
Carolina complains that her film teacher “had no teach cred, was hopelessly ding-headed,
suffered epizootics of the blowhole and was full of booty-cheddar” (Marisha Pessl, Special
Topics in Calamity Physics [New York, 2007], p. 364).
43. “A Cheval-rous Patient,” Harper’s Weekly, 16 Nov. 1872, p. 904.
44. This idea accords with Jean Baudrillard’s provocative claim that “our sentimentality
toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them” (Jean Baudrillard, Simu-
lacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser [Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994], p. 134).

cultural imagination; in the process, it also deterritorialized veterinary ter-
minology and reterritorialized it in an incredibly popular cultural form.
If, as I have suggested, this process operates in a manner similar to that of
the type C virus, then not only is discourse surrounding animal disease
put to a different use; just as importantly, this transformation brings with
it “‘genetic information’ from the first host” that endures in the second
usage and that can be recovered through philological investigation. Phi-
lology, in other words, provides a new point of entry for current recon-
siderations of nonhuman life.
Just as it is difficult to imagine baboon DNA when we look at cats, it is
difficult to imagine the lived experiences of sickened animals when we
exclaim “oops!” At the same time, when this lineage has been established,
it becomes possible to enlist this knowledge to pursue new avenues for
interspecies intimacies. By dwelling on these rhizomatic possibilities, by
recasting oops not only as an expression of some minor mistake but also
as an occasion for rethinking human and nonhuman vulnerability, this
philology becomes not an amusing diversion but rather (in Antonio
Gramsci’s more radical sense) a method for understanding how cultural
meanings are made and might be remade.45
45. As Gramsci writes, “The basic innovation introduced by the philosophy of praxis into
the science of politics and of history is the demonstration that there is no such thing as an
abstract ‘human nature,’ fixed and immutable . . . [Instead], human nature is the totality of
historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact which can, within certain lim-
its, be ascertained with the methods of philology and criticism.” (Antonio Gramsci, “Machia-
velli and Marx,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quentin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York, 1971], p. 133).


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On the Origin of “Oops!

In Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla

Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019)

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

R a y m o n d M a l e w i t z is associate professor of English and Graduate Direc-

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

An Etiological Etymology of Oops

13. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York, 1933), p. 324.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

FIGURE 1. From “Horse Laughs at the Loco Weed War,” Virginia

15. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “oops.”

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Upon my sole I’ve walked so much

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

FIGURE 2. “A Cheval-rous Patient,” Harper’s Weekly, 16 Nov. 1872, p. 904.

to apply it to human diseases. A San Francisco Rural Press correspondent,

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

The Cultural Legacy of the Great Epizootic

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

34. Wald, Contagious, p. 53; and see p. 12.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

37. Royal Dixon, Signs is Signs (Philadelphia, 1915), p. 147.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

Critical Inquiry 2019.45:839-858.

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