It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 5th.
Today's word is inoculate, spelled I-N-O-C-U-L-A-T-E.
Inoculate is a verb.
To inoculate a person or animal is to introduce immunologically active material such as an antibody or antigen into them,
especially in order to treat or prevent a disease.
Inoculate can also mean to introduce something such as a microorganism into a suitable situation for growth.
And in a figurative sense,
it can mean to protect as if by inoculation or to introduce something into the mind of.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the weekly Calistogan.
Truffle farmers inoculate oak or hazelnut seedlings with truffle spores, plant the seedlings,
and wait patiently, often a decade or more, for the underground relationship to mature.
The eventual harvest is a reward for years of cooperation between tree and fungus.
If you think you see a connection between the word Inoculate and the word ocular,
meaning of or relating to the eye, you have a good eye.
Both words look back to occulus, the Latin word for eye.
But what does the eye have to do with inoculation?
Our answer lies in the original use of inoculate in Middle English,
meaning to insert a bud into a plant for propagation.
The Latin oculus was sometimes applied to things that were seen to resemble eyes,
and one such thing was the bud of a plant.