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On November 4, 1988, computers around the ARPANET network began acting strangely. They filled up with extraneous data, became sluggish, and then clogged completely. The odd behavior spread to about six thousand computers across the country and overseas, in a matter of hours. The system, it appeared, had been attacked by an unknown intruder.
Engineers at SRi international in Palo Alto, the firm responsible for ARPANET security, at first thought the intruder was a "virus," a software program that attaches itself to other programs. But the spread of the clogging behavior made it apparent that the intruder was a "worm," a self-contained program designed to invade and disable computers. This second explanation was correct. In computer terminology, the rogue program that invaded ARPANET was a "worm."
The San Francisco Chronicle headlined its November 5th story "Vicious 'Worm' Spreads Havoc Through Computers in U. S." The next day, its headline read: "How 'Worm' Was Defeated."
This was possibly the only newspaper, however, to use the correct term for the rogue program. In the wire services and at least eleven major dailies, the term of choice was "virus." Even the San Francisco Chronicle, in its story of November 6, noted, "The attacking program, alternately called a worm or virus, had been cleared from most places by midday yesterday."1
Why was this "worm" so quickly and painlessly identified as a "virus?" What we are dealing with here is a choice of metaphors. An analysis of these metaphors (using the "interaction" perspective of I. A. Richards) suggests a number of compelling reasons for the preference of "virus" over "worm."
Each metaphor, Richards tells us, results from the interaction between two parts: its "vehicle," which is the word selected, and its "tenor," the underlying situation. A powerful metaphor identifies two separate domains in such a way that we are able to explore one domain by tracing the implications of the other domain.2
In the case of the computer intruder of November 1988, there was a choice of two major vehicles: the "worm" or the "virus." If the "worm" was chosen as the vehicle, how would this illuminate the tenor, or underlying situation? Indeed, we have few systems of...