yellow fever
English
[edit]
Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]- (pathology) An acute febrile illness of tropical regions, caused by a flavivirus (Yellow fever virus) and spread by certain mosquitoes, characterised by jaundice, black vomit and the absence of urination.
- Synonyms: (obsolete) black vomit, (obsolete) yellow jack, (obsolete) Bulam fever
- Hypernym: mosquito-borne disease
- 2016, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Fleet (2017), page 257:
- The town up the road was overcome by yellow fever, he said. All travelers warned away.
- (figurative, slang) An attraction to ethnically East Asian men or women, expressed by non-East Asian (especially white European male or white American) people.
- Synonym: Asian fever
- Hyponym: Japanese fever
- Coordinate terms: Arab fever, black fever, blue fever, jungle fever, white fever, Indian fever
- 2015, “In This B*tch”, in WORLDWIDE, performed by Jay Park:
- Your girl want me, we both know / Cause she got yellow fever
- (figurative, dated) A lust for gold; an obsession with seeking gold ore.
- Synonym: gold fever
- 1910, Giacomo Puccini, La Fanciulla Del West: The Girl of the Golden West:
- He's got the yellow fever; Once get the sight of gold and you are poisoned.
- 1951, George Peter Hammond, The Larkin Papers, Univ of California Press:
- An onze a day, two a day, or three—every one has the gold or yellow fever. Last night several of the most respectible American residents of this town arrived home from a visit to the gold regions.
- 1963, Robert Raine Geyer, Death Trails in Bolivia to Faith Triumphant:
- But the true yellow fever that has abounded in the lower gold-bearing valleys around Guanay can possibly illustrate in sickness what takes place in actuality among the sons of men who are seduced by the lust for gold.
- 2000 October 10, W. Jacobson, Dickens and the Children of Empire, Springer, →ISBN, pages 68–69:
- In the stories he wrote and published about the gold rush, Dickens does not resolve characters' feelings of class resentment so much as explain them in non-political terms […] Dickens spreads this strain of 'yellow fever' among his characters, making their labour unrest seem both understandable and pathological.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]illness
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slang: attraction
See also
[edit]sexual preference
Further reading
[edit]- “yellow fever n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present