I was really excited when we learned about kuru last week because of a personal experience I had involving kuru. (Before you get worried--I am not a cannibal, nor do I know anyone who is, and I don't have kuru.) During Winter break I played Balderdash with my cousins and I was trying to find a short but obscure word for my turn. I happened to be in the K's in the dictionary and I found the word "kuru." I hadn't ever heard of it before, but I decided to use it. Turns out my cousins hadn't heard of it either and I won a lot of points from that round.
Today I was looking on the internet for articles about kuru and I happened across a "content, marketing, and public relations" company (web design company). They are called Kuru Heavy Industries. The company itself has nothing to do with kuru, but I found it amusing that they referenced the deadly disease on their "about" page:
We at Kuru deal in content, which is nothing more than the transmission of ideas and information. Hence the name.
and
Kuru: content that fries your brain.
1 comment:
That's pretty cool. I think I forgot to mention the fact that the name Kuru itself comes from the Fore language and means 'trembling' - or more precisely 'trembling with fear' since I guess they have more than one word for trembling. I find it disturbing that a tribe of cannibals would have a special word for 'trembling with fear'....
Given the number of metal bands named after diseases (see earlier blog postings)I just wondered whether there were any bands called Kuru. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I now know there were two bands called Kuru: a British Punk Band in the late 1990's, and a San Francisco based Death Metal band that still seems to be active.
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