When your head clogs and your nose runs, you may have influenza . Worse than a cold, the flu can last a week, ending with an Amazon of lime phlegm that accounts for its name.
Yes, our ancestors blamed the stars for their drippy nostrils, the Milky Way somehow tipping a malign aura into the sickly, a mystic liquid flooding the bronchioles. Earthlings have a history of denouncing heaven, as it happens. Disaster, for starters, translates as ill-starred, just as lunacy implicates the moon.
Engineers were next to borrow the idea, judging by an American patents gazette of 1902. Listed between a flanged bedpan and a banana-holder is an electric railway relying on “electromagnetic influencers connected between two respective pairs of terminals”. A planet, a magnet, a magician – influencer moved its way through last century, decade by decade, but not with any speed.of 1933.